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Read transcriptBy 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...

Read transcriptMost 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...

Read transcriptEvery generation needs a reminder that games-based-on-movies-based-on-comics are their own strange little ecosystem, and Hellboy: The Science of Evil is a proud, slightly confused citizen of it. It doesn’t adapt either del Toro movie directly. Instead it just borrows the general vibe, invents its own plot, and trusts you to recognize a giant stone fist and a wisecracking demon...

Read transcript>Let’s just say it up front: turning a trading card game into a video game is a magic trick where the “trading” and the “card” both quietly slip out the back door, leaving you with a menu that goes “ding” when you win. And Marvel decided this was worth doing not once, but on two separate handhelds that weren’t even talking to each other, like a superhero team-up where nobody...

Read transcriptEvery kid who ever begged a parent for money to hit GameStop on release day understands the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship series in their bones: it’s the same card game, sold back to you once a year, wearing a slightly fancier hat each time. Konami ran this bit from 2003 to 2006 with the discipline of a Swiss watchmaker and the restraint of absolutely nobody when it came to naming...

Back in 1988, CBS gave us Garfield: His 9 Lives, an anthology special where our favorite lasagna enthusiast got to be a caveman, a pampered Egyptian god-cat, and an honest-to-goodness astronaut fending off an interstellar war fleet. Ambitious! Mythic, even! Then in 2006, Lucky Jump Games and The Game Factory looked at that legacy, borrowed the exact same title for a Game Boy Advance platformer,...

Read transcriptLet’s talk about the year 2007, when Ubisoft looked at Konami’s TMNT license, going up for grabs after three straight beat-em-ups, and said “yeah, we’ll take it,” the video game equivalent of adopting somebody else’s very large, very established pet. They tied the whole thing to Imagi’s brand new fully CGI turtle movie and then, in an act of scheduling chaos I can only respect,...

Read transcriptBy the mid-2000s, Naruto had pulled off something most manga-to-anime properties never manage: it wasn’t just popular, it was everywhere, spinning off a small army of video games across nearly every system with a screen, like Naruto himself used Shadow Clone Jutsu on the entire games industry and nobody thought to stop him. Somewhere in that flood of Ninja Councils and Clash of...

Read transcriptLet’s talk about Spider-Man 3, the movie where Sam Raimi looked at “menacing single antagonist” and said no thank you, I would like three, please, and also I would like Peter Parker to dance down the street like he’s auditioning for a jazz-hands cult. It’s a movie that tried to do everything, mostly succeeded at doing too much, and somehow still made enough money that Activision...

Read transcriptVideo game licensing runs on a very simple equation: if a popular franchise exists, and a handheld system exists, someone will eventually put a game together and slap on a release date. That’s probably the story behind Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour, with Konami treating the whole affair with the enthusiasm of checking a box on an extremely profitable to-do list. It was the...