Indie and Retro

Edutainment! It’s when you learn and it’s fun! Are you in your adult years and wondering why so many of us played the same handful of educational video games during “computer class” growing up? There’s a reason! Is there still computer class in school? The young people have apps and tablets instead. There are educational apps! Maybe too many. Join us as we edutain you on a journey through 60 years of video games meant to teach while also being fun to play, and find out what happened to The Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego.

Mario had TWO big events in the same week for us, specifically: Super Mario Wonder came out on the Switch, and we got to go to Super Nintendo World in Hollywood for the first time ever. Hear us talk about both of these things, including development history of both and what we think! We rode the rides! Well, the ride. And we played the games! Both in real life and on the TV. What is real anymore, truly?

The Game Awards - the annual Oscars show but for video games - are almost ten years old. But where did they come from? Was it all just some strange concoction cooked up in Geoff Keighley’s little gamer brain? Turns out the answer is: mostly, yeah! Join us as we delve into the history of The Game Awards: where they came from and where they’re going. You might think they’re bad! But just wait until you see how things used to be before Geoff made them what they are today…

Special part of this episode: Mumbles did all the research this time! So she leads the whole show! She was very nervous but her husband thinks she did a really great job.

Super Mario Bros. (1993) is NOT The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). It’s something much weirder, for many reasons. Money. Inexperience. Nine different writers and daily script changes. It’s not a good movie, but it is a very interesting one. No one can say that it didn’t have ideas, but maybe it could’ve had some different ones?

Because a Patreon suggested it, join us as we recap the film and our reactions to it, before delving in to why and how it ended up the way it did. Then you can watch the new movie instead, which actually feels like a Mario film and not a hijinks-filled cyberpunk dystopia full of too-good-for-this stage actors and the people behind Max Headroom.

(Also: thank you to kodyack for some of the reference links, and to Bryce for suggesting it!)

Daisy is NOT Princess Peach - she is her own character! And she’s been around maybe longer than you thought, although it wasn’t until the last 20 years or so that she’s firmly established herself in Mario canon as the sassy, sporty, “will Luigi make a move or what” wild princess of Sarasaland.

Learn where she came from and hopefully where she’s going as we take you on a journey allllll the way back to the launch of the original Game Boy. And as she says whenever it’s her turn in Mario Party, “DAISY!”

We are absolutely working on improving the audio quality of the I&R podcast, but we figured this cute little episode is worth sharing. We hope you love it and learn a lot about our girl Daisy!

Games I mention:

Potionomics

An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs

Wide Ocean Big Jacket

Part 2 of the Tomb Raider podcast shows what happens when you force a team to make a slightly improved version of the same game every year for five years in a row, and then you try to scale that game from PS1 to PS2 size without any real direction or leadership.

Lara Croft was an icon that made video games mainstream in a way that Mario never managed.

Warning: spooky stuff! This is a podcast about the creepypastas, and the scary stuff your friend said his cousin saw in a game once, and secret codes in games that may not actually exist (unless they do…?).

How much is real? How much is completely made up by someone being impish? And how much is a perversion of something that did really happen once, but has morphed beyond all recognition into something new? Maybe don’t listen to this one right before bed…

Additional stuff:

The Polybius Conspiracydocumentary podcast

Cat DeSpira’s Polybiusdeep-dive

We're back! Get ready for a summer edition of the Indie & Retro Podcast. Kicking things off: Team Fortress 2. This episode we talk about my formative years playing the game, get into the dev stuff, and ramble about hats. Yes, I said hats!

Part 2 of our Sonic podcast is about the marketing and legacy of his first game. Lots of good games are around, but very few had the cultural impact of this little blue hedgehog with attitude. If it wasn’t packaged specifically for the American market and showed people what the 90’s were all about, he may be more of an Alex Kidd today: just another platformer beaten by Mario. While the long-term hasn’t been completely kind to Sonic, there was a time he was on top of the world. How’d he get there? Listen and find out!