Total Playtime: Half-Life 3 Review Chat
Gordon’s fitness journey
This post is for paying subscribers only
Already have an account? Sign in.
Podcast
It is like when you read an article but with your ears.
Total Playtime: Wee Butt Mode
We might get a Duck Tales extraction shooter before GTA 6
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
In a rare treat this week’s episode is not talking about layoffs, but I contrived to introduce them as additional context for Pete Hines being savagely critical of what happened to Bethesda, so the narrative thread is maintained. Otherwise this is quite a good-natured look at the latest PC gaming happenings, including what turned out to be some extremely inaccurate guesses at what hackers had stolen from Rockstar, and what will doubtless prove to be extremely inaccurate guesses at what’s in Epic’s Disney-character extraction shooter.
Total Playtime Episode 33: Wee Butt Mode
0:00
/4428.1533
Other highlights this week include Brendy driving up some hills and becoming troubled by them, Nate establishing himself as our resident Jeff Kaplan correspondent, and the ease with which you can Mandela Event yourself into believing just about any idiotic Gamergate-y conspiracy theory is a real thing because they’re all so ridiculous as to be plausible.
Plus: troublesome dogs, IRL Pope
Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag
At last, the Z list
This post is for paying subscribers only
Already have an account? Sign in.
The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly
Toiling for Initiative
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.
Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.
Text Adventure - Mass Effect Andromeda Nexus Uprising
0:00
/5034.631836
The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you
Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals
Plus: mining sexual tension
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
This week we have fun (for a given value of fun) discussing Epic's mass layoffs. They got rid of a thousand actual people, for what I think are very vague reasons, i.e. Fortnite is somehow not making enough money. This seems like an impossible circumstance. Fortnite is basically a printing press that produces sheets of dollar bills with Tim Sweeney's face on.
Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals
0:00
/3547.2457142857143
Maybe he should stop trying to make a shop that most people don't use because its UI is still really bad and annoying. Why isn't there a half decent way to sort the games I have? Why does the application act like me asking it to order my game library in order of purchase is a task of the same difficulty as God asking Abraham to, like, seriously murk Isaac?
We also discuss Sony's dynamic price testing, which sees the return of a much beloved beans metaphor.
Total Playtime: Sink The Business Belgrano Within You
Plus: Don't ever hire Nigel Mansell as an after-dinner speaker
This post is for paying subscribers only
Already have an account? Sign in.
Total Playtime: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON
The slopping forecast
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
It's a news episode this week, and you know what that means: people getting cross about AI. The results are at least entertaining, though, starting with NVIDIA's DLSS technology which promises to yassify game characters regardless of circumstance or the artistic decisions of their creators. This is seemingly in service of photorealism, which has been the final goal of graphics card manufacturers since the days when they put weird CGI fairies on the boxes, but has never really been creatively interesting and never will be because we already know what reality looks like.
Total Playtime Episode 31: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON
0:00
/3605.1133
It nevertheless appears inevitable that the technology will be both widely available and widely used despite making the output actively worse, making it the videogame equivalent of TVs using motion smoothing by default, but in the meantime the memes have been pretty good and that's the best we can hope for in the
Total Playtime: Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Simulator
Let's play Simulation Simulator
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
Once again we find ourselves in a situation where I, Alice, was not there to record this episode, but am here to write the description for it. I can call Jonty a big smelly poohead and there's nothing he can do about it! Haha! You should have come up with a Podcast Post Editing Simulator, Jonty. That's the theme this week: coming up with pastimes to make simulation games about, but which have not already been simulated by ambitious and fast-moving developers. It turns out there are a lot of sim games.
Total Playtime: Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Sim
0:00
/3598.341224489796
Nevertheless, the lads were able to come up with several concepts, as follows:
- Philosophy Professor Simulator
- Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Simulator
- Lin Manuel Miranda's Bin Man Hell Uganda
- Left Wing Roid Monster Olympics (not the name Nate actually gave it but I feel mine is more evocative and not open to a lawsuit from Andy Samburg)