Psitanium Mine

Finally back from our break and so we must discuss one of the greatest games of all-time: Doritos Crash Course. Get ready to crash, crunch, corn chip and crash again in this interactive dystopic game show. Dark, foreboding, probably a psychological horror, shaped like a triangle, covered in cheese dust, we look into the most intense piece of product integrated media I played in March.

And so the time has come to rank all the games released in 2022 that I played and this is going to take awhile. There are 31 games on the list this year and that is even after some paring down from games I didn't play very much (listed in the episode), demos of upcoming games and some top releases I have not gotten to try yet. There is just so much to go through, so let's just get into it.

It’s the start of a brand new year! Let’s ring in 2023 with a nice, light episode discussing the entire Assassin’s Creed series spanning over a decade. Yes, this Psitanium Mine goes into the origins behind the series, the story of the Assassins and Templars, the evolution of the games through the years and where the series goes from here. Really light podcast for the start of the year.

Move over 12 Days of Christmas, Psitanium has 12 Months of Livestreams. Months are more than days. Most of the games played on stream were not made into Psitanium Mine episodes, so this is an opportunity to talk about all the games and whether it was good or not.

The amount of Metroidvania titles of late have been a bit lacking, but the number of games inspired by Dark Souls have erupted. Ghost Song is one of the games that tries to take elements from both genres to make something new. But are they the best elements? How do the two types of games work together? Will my love of one genre outweight my frustration with the other? We dig deep into those questions in this Psitanium Mine.

As we get over our Thanksgiving turkey coma, it seems like a good time to look at This Land is My Land, a game where you play a native warrior fighting against westward expansion. If that seems like fun to you, well, hold your horses. Besides the problematic elements around the theme and development, which we will discuss, there are some technical issues and choices that seem odd. So, what does this game do right and wrong? Come to the frontier in this Psitanium Mine.

Sometimes I try games that seem like they might be fun but end up being nothing I wish to continue playing. Many of them will wear out their welcome in under an hour. Here are a few examples of the games I played this year that went by so fast... because I stopped playing them.

While I don't play many scary games, I have come across scary moments in otherwise normal games. You can almost feel it in the way the tone shifts from one of feeling powerful to helpless. Sometimes it creeps up on you and sometimes it jumps up into your face and screams. We'll discuss a few of those from games I have played and beware some spoilers for: Halo, Control, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Bioshock Infinite, Portal and Half-Life 2.

From it's early roots in 1990s CRPGs to the modern open-world incarnations, Fallout has been a staple of the video gaming industry for decades. On this episode of Psitanium Mine, we're going to look at the origins of Fallout from the time it diverged from Wasteland, the time that Interplay spent making CRPGs and other experimental projects, the Bethesda era, cancelled entries in the series and what to expect in the future. Also, what makes the series so iconic and influential? 

And so, we step into the degrading footwear of Norman Reedus in the game Hideo Kojima really wanted to make. Death Stranding is a game where you do a bunch of walking so you can deliver packages across a broken world. Watch out for rocks… very small rocks. A very surreal and unique experience, but is it fun?