Play Comics

Read transcript Congratulations! You’ve been hired by the Justice League. Your title is “Hero,” your qualifications are “showed up,” and your first assignment is standing in Metropolis next to Superman while a stranger in a very small cape asks you where the good loot is. Welcome to DC Universe Online, the game where you can create your own superhero and then spend the entire first hour in the character creator, agonizing over the exact shade of your cape and a name that isn’t already taken by eleven thousand other guys who thought “Night-something” was original. The premise is gloriously simple: you get to live in the same world as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of DC’s heavy hitters, and the heavy hitters are weirdly cool about it. Nobody asks for a résumé. Nobody questions why a hero named “SteelGhostFlash7” is suddenly on the Watchtower. The Joker is out there being the Joker, Lex Luthor is out there being smug, and you are out there trying to figure out whether you’re a legend in the making or just a guy in tights who’s very good at following the glowing arrow on the map. Leaping into the DC playground with us is David Gallaher, writer of some of your favorite video games and comics, which means he’s spent years inventing heroes and villains on purpose, a luxury the rest of us only get in a character creator. David has been on both sides of the page, so he’s perfect for the question at the heart of this episode: when you drop yourself into a universe where the icons were already established decades ago, do you feel like a hero, or a very enthusiastic extra with a better costume? So grab your most dramatic cape, practice your brooding stare in the mirror, and settle in. Somewhere out there a hero is saving the city, and he’s definitely using a username he regrets. Also be sure to check out the full post so you can see some of the stuff that Daybreak sent over for me to share. It doesn’t play nicely with RSS feeds. Learn such things as: How weird do character names get when you can’t have repeats even after 15+ years of a game existing? Is it really that important to pick a good mentor? What happens if there’s a big giant threat and they need everyone to come help defeat it and you just… don’t? And so much more! You can find David on BlueSky @DavidGallaher or on LinkedIn @dgallaher. If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in. If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store. Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix. Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff. You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website. If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out. A big thanks to Across the Whoniverse and The Glitterjaw Queer Podcast Collective for the promos today. Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who is already a hero in my eyes. Support Play Comics by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/playcomics Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-89f00a for 40% off for 4 months, and support Play Comics.

Read transcript Wolverine is the best there is at what he does, and what he does is get stabbed, shot, and set on fire before shrugging it off and asking where the nearest bar is. His healing factor makes him the only character in comics who can have a terrible day, a worse day, and a questionable haircut, and still be back to normal by Tuesday. It’s easily the most relatable power in the Marvel universe, provided you’ve ever tried to recover from a long weekend. This episode is about X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a game built on the idea that a man with an indestructible skeleton has somehow misplaced his own backstory. He’s got amnesia, a grudge, and a tank top collection that suggests he’s never once been cold. It’s a story about a guy trying to remember who he is, told in a medium where the answer is usually “the one who’s yelling and tearing through everything within reach.” Helping us sort through the rage and the sideburns is Grant Stoye, the comic writer behind some of your favorite independently released comics and one of the minds behind the currently running Kickstarter for Yule Volume 2. Grant knows a thing or two about Wolverine-level resilience. Independent creators bounce back from deadlines, printer quotes, and shipping costs that would flatten lesser mutants, and their healing factor runs on coffee and optimism. If anyone can tell us whether a hero who survives everything can still keep a story interesting, it’s a guy who makes comics happen with no safety net and a lot of heart. Bring a bandage you won’t need, hide anything made of paper, and let’s find out whether this one earns its snikt or just growls a lot and leaves. Learn such things as: Is this the movie tie in game that most improves over the movie that its tied to? Who else was waiting for Deadpool to appear in the game for some commentary? How do you handle gameplay damage when the character can heal themselves just by existing? And so much more! You can find Grant on BlueSky @therealgstoye and of course his website NounAndVerb. And definitely check out the Kickstarter campaign for Yule Volume 2. If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in. If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store. Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix. Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff. You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website. If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out. A big thanks to Escape the Mojoverse and D’ohmance Dawn for the promos today. Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who also has things growing out from between his fingers. But it’s licorice. Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-89f00a for 40% off for 4 months, and support Play Comics.

Read transcript Garfield has spent decades perfecting one skill: refusing to leave the couch. So of course Hollywood sent him to England, handed him a royal lookalike, and made him the most reluctant cat in the history of the monarchy. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is a movie about mistaken identity, a very large castle, and a cat whose idea of a crown jewel is anything left unattended on a buffet table. Naturally, a video game was in order. The Nintendo DS got its own version, and so did the PlayStation 2, which means this cat managed to be a tiny royal on your lap and a tiny royal on your TV. Not many orange cartoon cats can say they’ve been in two different living rooms at once without moving. Joining us to sort through the royal mess is Chris Maynard from Following Films. Chris knows his way around a movie, which makes him ideal for the question at the heart of this episode: when you turn a movie about a cat pretending to be a prince into a game, does the cat get to keep pretending, or does he just end up running down hallways? Chris is here to tell us whether this is a proper adaptation or a very loud costume party. So polish your crown, put the snacks within reach, and let’s find out whether A Tail of Two Kitties is a game fit for a king or one that should have stayed incognito. Learn such things as: How many times can we use the same classic story as a foundation? How does such a lazy cat keep getting into these crazy situations? How much lasagna could you eat while watching this movie? Especially if the cat is trying to help you eat it. And so much more! You can Chris on BlueSky @followingfilms, Threads @following_films, and of course the Following Films website. If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in. If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store. Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix. Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff. You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website. If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out. A big thanks to AARPG and Xanadar Radio for the promos today. Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who refuses to share any lasagna with me. Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-89f00a for 40% off for 4 months, and support Play Comics.

Read transcript By the time Digimon World 3 rolled around in 2002, a franchise that started as an egg-shaped virtual pet and spun off into a manga and an anime around the same time had picked up enough separate games and separate continuities that keeping any of it straight had apparently stopped being a priority. At least one reviewer we found says flat-out that the game gets its own canon wrong in places, which at this point feels less like a flaw and more like a house style. You play a kid named Junior, no last name, no further explanation, who gets pulled into a server with three Digimon partners, though only one is allowed to actually fight at a time while the other two wait their turn. Enemies show up completely at random now too, so unlike earlier games in the series, you can’t just spot trouble on the map and calmly walk the other way. Take enough hits and your blast meter fills up, letting a Digimon go Blast Digivolve and get meaner for a while, or you can combine two Digimon with DNA Digivolve to create something new that fires off one big attack and then immediately splits back apart. There’s also a full card battle game built right into the RPG, all 314 cards of it, so between fetch quests you’ll have plenty of downtime to build a deck. Joining us to help sort through all of it is Chels Eichholz, who co-hosts The Q Division, a James Bond rewatch podcast, and Across the Whoniverse, a Doctor Who marathon show that “kidnaps” a new companion every episode to explore a different corner of sixty-plus years of continuity. Between those two franchises, Chels has plenty of practice diving into a huge tangle of lore and coming out the other side having a genuinely great time, which makes them the perfect person to take on a game that’s basically nothing but tangled lore. So dig up an old memory card, pick which one of your three Digimon gets to have a personality this round, and let’s find out whether Digimon World 3 earned its spot in Digimon history, or whether it should’ve DNA Digivolved into something else entirely. Learn such things as: How did the local programming directors help shape our personalities, and are we really losing something by streaming making all things possible? How many versions of ‘volving can you have before you have to start paying Sweedish taxes? How often can you go from Point A to Point B to Point A to Point B to Point A to Point B before throwing things out the window? And so much more! You can find Chels on Bluesky @chels725, check out her link tree for an always up to date set of links, and of course on her podcasts The Q Division and Across the Whoniverse. If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in. If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store. Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix. Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff. You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website. If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out. A big thanks to Infinite Earths Guide and Gimmicks for the promos today. Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who would probably be right at home if trapped in a computer doomsday situation. Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-89f00a for 40% off for 4 months, and support Play Comics.

Read transcript Most podcast guests call in from a spare bedroom, a closet lined with winter coats, or a parked car outside a grocery store. Josh Garvey is joining us from the middle of a black hole. On the bright side, the room tone is fantastic. Nothing echoes when nothing, light included, is allowed to leave. It’s also a fitting backdrop, because this episode is all about taking an adventure you used to play and asking it to sit still on a page. Somebody looked at a whole quest built on mashing buttons and said, “What if the only button left was ‘turn the page’?” The bravest thing you can do is lick your thumb. That’s a bold leap from the action genre to the paper-cut genre, and we’re going to take a hard look at The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in comic form. Josh has agreed to walk us through it from beyond the event horizon, where time runs a bit slow, so by the time you hear this he’s technically still on his first sentence. That also makes him the only guest we’ve ever had who can offer a genuine link to the past, a pun I’ve been sitting on since the moment he said yes. We had to be careful with the mic placement, since anything left within Josh’s reach gets stretched into a very long strand of spaghetti. Lesson learned about the pop filter. So please keep your arms, legs, and any nearby light inside the episode at all times, and don’t panic if the audio shows up a few billion years late. Nobody has ever returned from a black hole to leave a bad review, which honestly might be the best business model in podcasting. Learn such things as: What’s the difference between looking into the future and influencing the future? How much can you change an iconic story when adapting to a new medium? Will the greatness of the Super Nintendo ever come back to us? And so much more! You can find Josh if you already know how to find Josh. Which is pretty much on other episodes of this very podcast. Or you can watch this episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he told me to link to. If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in. If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store. Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix. Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff. You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website. If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out. A big thanks to Saved as Draft and I Am Your Target Demographic for the promos today. Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who was not available for comment because he was too busy playing this game. And honestly I can’t blame him at all. Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-89f00a for 40% off for 4 months, and support Play Comics.