Pointless Side Cast Episode 8: Crimes Against My Mouth

It's time for episode 8 of Pointless Side Cast! Join John Markley, Corey Atwood, Logan Kraus, Nick Nguyen, and Jade Kimmel as their discussion of their experiences with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is catastrophically derailed before it even leaves the station by an ill-advised dare from Corey involving the words “if you drank the entire thing.”

Don't miss out on an episode filled with:

Pure evil in concentrated liquid form!

Battlefield 4!

The Nature Boy Ric Flair!

The awesomeness that is Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death!

Interstellar genocide!

Blacklight: Retribution!

John coughing out an entire lung live on the air!

Crusader Kings II!

The latest sanity-shattering horror Nick has unleashed upon the world!

PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which we actually do get to eventually!

Lines between man and machine that never should have been crossed!

Batman: Arkham Origins!

New definitions of pain and suffering!

Logan reporting on the new Kinect!

Birdemic-based relationship abuse!

Knack!

Fine liquor sellers of Chicagoland!

Persona!

Thirst for the blood of children!

Solar 2!

Ass droids!

Ryse: Son of Rome!

Jade's mysterious secret! 

World of Warcraft!

Crippling addictive behavior!

Dead or Alive Ultimate!

And, of course, much more.

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Pointless Side Cast Episode 7: Nick's Kitchen of Terror

It's time for Episode 7 of Pointless Side Cast! The whole gang is here as John Markley, Nick Nguyen, Corey Atwood, Jade Kimmel, and Logan Kraus gather together to discuss PlayStation 4 launch titles, games they've played lately, the most recent of Nick's seemingly endless procession of bizarre household mishaps, John's petty mind games, Corey's corrupting influence, and beyond. Join them for all this, plus:

Crusader Kings II!

Illinois' baffling non-Euclidean geography!

Grand Theft Auto V!

Starscream!

Beyond: Two Souls!

Hitler's mechazombies!

Shadows of the Damned!

Nick's poison cupcakes!

Divekick!

Blasphemous kitchen necromancy!

Knack!

The wit and wisdom of the YouTube comments section!

A thoughtful discussion about the relative merits of Call of Duty and Battlefield, lead by someone who hasn't played either since the first Modern Warfare!

Spelunky!

Transformers: War for Cybertron!

Confusing, arbitrary selection criteria!

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn!

Human sacrifice!

Race the Sun!

Suda 51's restrained, nuanced approach to human anatomy!

Speedrunners!

Amnesia: The Dark Descent!

Depraved 11th-century Welsh aristocrats!

Killer Instinct!

Lemmy!

Killzone: Shadow Fall!

Corey undergoes mitosis live on the air!

Watch Dogs!

The first reference to Bubsy anyone has made since the Clinton administration!

And much, much more.

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Pointless Side Cast Episode 6: Baphomet 5eva

It's time for Episode 6 of Pointless Side Cast! Join John Markley, Nick Nguyen, Corey Atwood, and Logan Krauss as they talk about what they've been playing lately and  valiantly attempt to keep discussion on-topic long enough to discuss launch titles for this month's next-gen consoles. Featuring:

Xbox One!

Grand Theft Auto V!

Japan's confused love affair with 17th-century European mounted infantry!

The plague of River City Ransom-inspired violence destroying the youth of America!

Ryse: Son of Rome!

The orientation-transcending sexual magnetism of Keith David!

Dead Rising 3!

The high-stakes world of turnip trading!

Saint's Row 4!

Tom Clancy and Elmer T. Lee, apropos of nothing!

VR Troopers!

Nick pays tribute to the recent passing of gaming industry titan Hiroshi Yamauchi by completely forgetting his name!

Prototype!

The draconian football sign regime at Washington State University!

Papers, Please!

Terraria!

Ridiculous accents of classical antiquity!

Animal Crossing: New Leaf!

Logan's lust for tiger-assisted violence!

Killer Instinct!

The corpse-choked rivers of the Oregon Trail!

Crimson Dragon!

And much more.

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Nick would like to dedicate this episode to the memory of:

Nintendo Guy

1927-2013

Requiescat in pace 

Pointless Side Cast Episode 5: Starring Vin Diesel as Fluttershy

It's time for episode 5 of Pointless Side Cast! Join John Markley, Nick Nguyen, and Logan Krauss as their attempts to discuss the Summer Steam Sale are continuously derailed in this digression-riddled trainwreck of an episode! 

Don't miss out on topics like:

Nick's apartment burning down!

Duke Nukem Forever!

Logan reporting live from a metal tool shed!

The Last of Us!

The rich mythoi of The Fast and The Furious and My Little Pony, joined together at last!

Call of Juarez!

Luc Besson movies!

Suda 51!

The horrors of Saints Row 2's PC port!

Brief musical interludes to patch over the part where I edited out a twenty-minute discussion of camera angles in action movies!

Alan Wake!

M. Night Shyamalan!

Hitman!

Nick alienates at least two more vital demographics forever!

Metal Gear!

Why John is a horrible, horrible friend!

Alpha Protocol!

Klezmer!

Lollipop Chainsaw!

The strategic and logistical problems of building prisons in outer space for no reason!

Dust: An Elysian Tail!

Duke Nukem's forbidden love!

The Walking Dead!

The programming wizardry behind Sonic the Hedgehog 2006!

And much, much more.

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Pointless Side Cast, Episode 4: The Loganing

It's time for the fourth episode of Pointless Side Cast! For the first time, this episode gathers all five members of Robot Geek's old Some Assembly Required podcast, with Logan Krauss joining John Markley, Jade Kimmel, Nick Nguyen, and Corey Atwood to talk about the highlights and lowlights of E3 2013 amd other topics from the world of video games. Join the gang for important subjects like:

The future of robe technology!

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!

Logan joining the conversation via a laptop made in the late 1870s!

Shin Megami Tensei IV!

Crushing despair!

Saint's Row 4!

Appalling Kinect-enabled laziness!

Corey trying to talk Nick into eating candle wax!

Struggling in vain to figure out what the hell the deal with Quantum Break is!

Infamous: Second Son!

Tactical horse espionage!

Titanfall!

Nick accidentally gluing his hands to his own face live on the air!

Mirror's Edge 2!

Stonerville, Pennsylvania!

Dead Rising 3!

Captain Kirk's bloodthirsty misogyny!

Halo!

Me singing part of "I Will Wait for You" badly enough to induce the sudden apoptosis of your entire auditory cortex!

Emilio Estevez!

And much, much more.

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Pointless Side Cast Episode 3: Nick's Revenge

The third episode of Pointless Side Cast is here! John Markley, Corey Atwood, and Jade Kimmel are joined by another of their old Robot Geek compatriots, Nick Nguyen, for over an hour of edifying discussion on such subjects as:

The Xbox One reveal!

Marvel Heroes!

Corey's epic battle with his audio input settings!

Call of Duty: Ghost!

Nick's mastery of international finance!

Noncanonical F.E.A.R. expansion packs!

Bruce Dickinson!

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap!

The waking nightmare that is the PlayStation Network!

Dead Island: Riptide!

Sony's wanton abuse of the word "beta!"

Misogyny of the 23rd century!

Demon Souls!

Corey enters puberty at last!

League of Legends!

Sinister biometric mind-reading!

And much more!

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Because it's been too long since Hitler appeared in a 3DS game: New Releases for the Week of June 9th, 2013

The Last of Us

(PlayStation 3) Third -person action game, set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a plague that turns people into- as is now apparently required by law for games released in the United States- zombies, or some close analogue of them.  The zombies don't really seem to be center stage this time, though, with human antagonists figuring quite prominently

It's from Uncharted developers Naughty Dog, and a lot of the gameplay I've seen- with its combination of cover-based shooting and melee fighting- actually seems reminiscent of that franchise, except that now it's starring the Dead to Rights: Retribution version of Jack Slate in his later years, Sully is a teenage girl, and the plot and characterization don't politely pretend not to notice that the gameplay involves killing large numbers of human beings at ranges short enough to see the terror in their eyes as they die. It looks interesting.

Bugs vs. Tanks! 

(Nintendo 3DS eShop) In the tradition of Plants vs. Zombies, Marvel vs. Capcom, and Konami's critically panned 2011 God of War-inspired beat'em up Roe Vs. Wade, the endless procession of X vs. Y games continues with it's most cruelly unfair match-up yet, Bugs vs. Tanks. The game is most noteworthy for involving Keiji Inafune, who was the character designer and artist for the original Mega Man- the classic character as he appeared in the games, not the obscene, tortured mockery of the human form from the American box art- and one of the driving forces behind the Mega Man series, as well as the producer of the Dead Rising series and some of the Onimusha games.

The story involves a group of World War II-era German panzers that have been shrunk down to a tiny fraction of their normal size , which does even the odds somewhat. How or why this has happened is unclear, though I respect any game that goes with a premise that seems to have been devised by someone who played Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 and said, "This alternate history Second World War just isn't silly enough."