Psitanium Mine

Steam Next Fest recently happened and so many game demos were available to play. Psitanium was able to get his hands on 12 and decided to talk about them on this episode. So, let's jet around a canyon at 1,000 mph, load a flintlock pistol, open a blacksmith shop, survive as a Viking, clean up a dungeon and figure out what Once Human is trying to be.

Wall World is a vertical rogue-lite game where you pilot a giant mech and dig into a giant wall to collect crystals. Also, you occasionally fight monsters. Eventually a large ink monster will try to kill you with a laser beam. Let's take revenge on it.

Quinn Hicks is having a very bad day. Welcome to the world of Beyond Contact, a survival game on an alien planet where you have to avoid getting killed by vicious creatures, the locals and exposure to the elements. So, let's build a base, grow some fruit and seek out oxygen deposits on Ketern. #BeyondContact #PsitaniumMine #survival

Little Witch in the Woods was Psitanium's worst ranked game of 2022, due to it being so mind-numbingly slow and boring. But, it was rather cute and really felt like a shame that it wasn't better. So, on this Second Chances episode, we are returning to the woods to brew some potions and talk to our hat in the hopes that it has improved. Emphasis on the word "hopes".

Finally, a farming sim on the show... for the 20th time. Lightyear Frontier tasks you with growing crops on an alien world while you are riding around in the giant mech. This sounds like an easy win, but it did not start out that way.

Hey, remember Vampire Survivors? The indie game scene sure does, because we have been swamped with bullet heaven games since it's release in 2022. Today on the show, we go into levels of hell in Halls of Torment, give a potato some guns in Brotato and help a frog defend his farm in Pesticide Not Required.

Stop. Zombie time. Many years have past since Psitanium played Dying Light and Dead Island. It's even been a couple years since he played them a second time. And all the while, there was a certain impression of the games burned into his head. Now we look at their sequels and, boy, the structural changes they make really changed his perception of the series. Let's discuss what changes, what stayed the same and if it was good or not.

And so we travel back to the metro to look at post-apocalyptic Russia. Good times.Once upon a time, Nathan tried playing Metro Exodus and then stopped suddenly before completing the first chapter. Now, he goes back to finish the game in it's entirety. Was it worth it? We explore the winter wasteland to find out.

Avast ye hardies. We are about to set sail with 2 naval games about the high seas and looting booty. First, we have the "Quadruple A" game from Ubisoft that finally saw the light of day, Skull and Bones. Does it stack up to the lineage of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag or somehow prove a worse version a whole decade after it started development? Second, we have Sail Forth, a smaller indie game from 2022 where you explore a water world in search of shinies and photo opportunities. Can the scrappy little game be more fun than it's major studio counterpart or will it beach itself on a rock?

There are some games I pick up for a moment and then put down, never to return to again. Many games I simply fall asleep while playing. These are not games that deserve to be on a best to worst list for how little I can evaluate them. But, on this episode of Psitanium Mine, we will be discussing those titles from 2023 and why they weren't on the list.

There are some games I pick up for a moment and then put down, never to return to again. Many games I simply fall asleep while playing. These are not games that deserve to be on a best to worst list for how little I can evaluate them. But, on this episode of Psitanium Mine, we will be discussing those titles from 2023 and why they weren't on the list.

It's that time of year when we do the best to worst list and boy, there are so many big titles we need to discuss. There were some truly great games that came out and also… less good ones. This year's list has 31 games on it and it's quite a marathon. Enjoy.

It's finally time. We need to discuss the Mass Effect trilogy. Not only did I have a reluctance to finish the series, but apparently I had a reluctance to do an episode about it. So, let us look at the Legendary Edition, which updates and synergizes the three installments into a cohesive product. Does that help with the experience as opposed to the first time I played it many years ago? And should we still be critical of the ending?

Strange that we never talked about No Man's Sky on this show before. Since it's Spacember, I guess we can rectify that. So, let's go into the infinite universe to collect carbon.

Time to discuss Breathedge for the first… second time! We did a Psitanium Mine episode on the game back in 2021, but it's time to revisit the exploded ship and minimal gravity of this game world. Will we find our dead grandfather before it's too late? Well, no, because he's already dead.

Prey will make you question reality itself. You will never pick up a mug without smacking it with a wrench ever again. Arkane was in peak shape when they made this reboot and it holds up to this day. So dust off your neuromods and fire up the q-beam, we're going to fight the Typhon one more time.

Starfield is a big game… too big, you could say. In fact, Starfield has so many things going on that it's hard to explain exactly what you do in the game, but let us discuss what stood out after my 100+ hours of playing Bethesda's new sandbox.

It's been awhile since we had a Psitanium Mine. To make up for it, wwe are pleased to announced a whole month of space game episodes. It shall be called… SPACEMBER!!! During December, each week we will feature a big space game, including Starfield, Prey, Breathedge, Dead Space and the Mass Effect trilogy. Merry Spacemas everyone!!!

Go on a hike up Hawk Peak with your anthropomorphic bird protagonist Claire while collecting golden feathers to take you even higher. All in the service of getting cell reception to call home. Let's discuss a lighter, shorter game than we normally do as a nice change of pace.

Metroidvanias are cropping up more often now and it's a welcome return to a great genre. F.I.S.T. is such a title with the added benefit of featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit with a giant mechanical fist on his back. Sounds great, right?

We here at Psitanium Mine are connoisseurs of fine Borderlands content. As such, we proudly present the fantasy-infused looter shooter Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Gearbox gives us magic, dragons, pirates, unicorns, hand crossbows and so much more as we cross the overworld and hunt down The Dragon Lord. How does it stack up to other titles in the series? What works better and what features are missing here?

It's always a pleasure to play a nice management sim and in this episode we discuss Tavern Master. Here we will build out our tavern, make a hotel, cook some food and host some distinguished dignitaries. Can we get the entire medieval town drunk? Well, yeah, but can we make a profit doing so? Still working on that.

It's a good old-fashioned demo round-up! Yeehaw! On this Psitanium Mine, we hit the streets as a cat in Little Kitty, Big City. Then we build the untamed wilderness one tile at a time in Above Snakes. We find out what would happen if Vampire Survivors and Hades in Death Must Die! Finally, we get to live the dream of befriending dinosaurs in the cozy game Paleo Pines.

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game ever. Skyrim is but a fraction it's size. Oblivion could fit in Daggerfall's pocket. But the problem is that the game is very old. Luckily, a Unity version was made a few years ago, in an attempt to update the game for modern audiences. But can the old-school Daggerfall survive the modern gamer… i.e. Me? Let's find out.

And here we are, with my top 10. Well, the other 10. But the top 5 I swear is the real top 5. I'm not good at ranking things. What games stuck with me through all these years? Watch to find out.

Do you ever get depressed with the current state of games? I did toward the beginning of the year and it led me to put together a list of my favorite games of all time. Make a note that this does not mean the games I think are the best, but my personal favorites. This is part 1, handling numbers 20-11, although we're playing very fast and loose with our numbering system here.

So, recently I stumbled into my Amazon Games account that I barely remember having. Come to find out I had many games ready to claim and, on a lark, I thought I would try playing some of them. On this episode, we are going to look at Kardboard Kings, Grime and Abandon Ship… for better or worse. Gonna have to check out the episode to find out which is which.

Farming is always better with magic and Homestead Arcana delivers in that regard. So, let's grow some crops, obsessively tend to them, talk to a cat and throw on a plague doctor mask to explore an infected world. Oh, the places you'll go... on a broomstick.

Make my boners grow! Boneraiser Minions is sort of like Vampire Survivors but with summoning boney boyz. Does it work though? Well…

We now return to the cozy life sim with No Place Like Home, a game about returning to an Earth covered in trash… so everything is basically the same. Ellen comes to look for her grandfather and does some tidying up along the way, building a farm and battling spider robots. Just another day in the post-apocalypse.

Atomic Heart is what happens if you took the concept of Bioshock and placed it in the post-WW2 Soviet Union. And it feels like the Russian version of a dystopic alternate history. To some degree, it works, and yet in many others, it falls short. So, what went right and wrong and is it actually Russian propaganda?

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?

Sit down. Everything is going to be okay. We're going to talk about an open-world survival game. The good news is that this is a widely acclaimed indie project based with a healthy dose of Norse mythology. You will fight gremlins. Trolls will throw boulders at you. You will get killed by a tree. Let me tell you about my experience playing Valheim.

Back in the camp of the souls-like genre, we go back time to 2014 and look at Lords of the Fallen. Is it as difficult as Dark Souls? Is it more accessible than Dark Souls? How annoying are the bosses? Well, let's go into that.

Recently, we went through a retrospective of the Diablo series. Recent entries have been less than impressive, but the genre is much larger than that series. So, Psitanium has been playing some other examples of the hack-n-slash ARPG genre. Among them were the prominent examples of TitanQuest and Grim Dawn. Are they as good or better than Diablo? Which one stands above the other? Also, a few brief notes on Rum and Gun and Path of Exile.

It's gardening time and that's gotten Psitanium thinking about Stardew Valley, among his favorite games. So, on this episode, we discuss the farming game made by one person that turned the indie game market on it's head and spawned countless imitators, many of which were also really good. So, quit Joja and start fixing up the community center, Pelican Town awaits.

Well, Diablo Immortal came out to... reactions. Since we are trying to forget that and looking towards Diablo 4, Psitanium thought he would do a stupid thing and go over a brief history and critique of the Diablo series, past, present and future. Which ones were the best? Did Diablo show up at any point is this more of a Waiting for Godot situation?

Now that we know there will be a remake of the Knights of the Old Republic, it seems like a good time to look back at the original. As one of the greatest RPGs of all time and one of Psitanium's Top 10, let's go over what the game did and why it warrants a remake today.

Bethesda has released new information about Starfield and we should probably go over it, because the picture of what this game is has become much clearer. But we should also talk about the general problem with space games and how Starfield hopes to fit in a space that has already been dominated by other games.

Out of all the games I have played, Fallout New Vegas stands as one of the best RPGs. When I realized there has never been an episode of the show discussing the Fallout games, I decided to go back and talk at length about why New Vegas was such an excellent piece of video gaming. We will look at how the game starts off with a bang, the influences that made it possible, the way it builds player choices, the personal courier story versus the fight for the Mojave, the DLC and the legacy that it left. Grab your big iron because war... war never changes.

If you ever wanted a game that never ends, you have finally found it. No Man's Sky had a rocky start to it's life, but plenty of major updates later, it has alot to offer. Freighters, frigates, colonies, animal breeding, base building and so much more are now here for you as you explore the virtual universe. Let us take to the stars and talk about what you can expect from No Man's Sky in 2022.

Well, since he just played Rage, we might as well talk about Rage 2. Because it is a very different experience in the way the world and gameplay function. And it's not even about being better or worse, just different. That's explain that in this Psitanium Mine.