Timothy is writing this one because Sam point blank refuses to touch it. “A console RTS is an oxymoron,” he said, before muting himself on our call for ten minutes to go analyse Street Fighter frame data instead. Carl had to talk him back onto the topic three separate times. Meanwhile John thinks Halo Wars 2 is one of the most interesting risk taking strategy games of the last decade, and Joe just wants to…
Marcus is writing this one because John spent an entire Zoom call insisting Titanfall was “just Call of Duty with jetpacks and robots,” which is the kind of lazy take that makes an engineer’s eye twitch. Tim discovered the game last year through backwards compatibility and won’t stop talking about wall running into people’s faces with a shotgun. Sam wanted frame data on the Smart Pistol lock on time. Carl had to mute John twice.…
# Call of Duty: Black Ops III Sam wanted this one. He’s been running frame data comparisons between Black Ops III’s specialist abilities for three years now, treating it like a fighting game with guns, and honestly, he’s not wrong to. But Joe called dibs on hating it first (Genesis bias doesn’t stop at consoles apparently, it extends to entire genres he’s decided are beneath him), and John wanted to write eight thousand words about…
# Ori and the Blind Forest John got handed this one after telling Tim, in no uncertain terms, that a game running on a modern engine with fully mapped controller support and instant load times still owes everything to design principles that were being worked out on 7.14 megahertz processors back when Tim was still working out how to hold a controller properly. Carl muted the call for a solid four minutes. Sam kept asking…
Marcus is writing this one because everyone else on the team is still arguing about whether Quantum Break counts as a game or a very expensive interactive television experiment. John thinks it’s one of the most underrated releases of the Xbox One generation. Joe dismisses it because it came out after 2010 and doesn’t have a single sprite in it. Tim liked the acting but got bored during the shooting sections. Sam spent forty hours…
# Halo 5: Guardians Right, I’m not the usual person you’d expect to write about a modern console shooter. My patch is arcade PCBs, CRT monitors and keeping thirty year old power supplies from catching fire. But Carl asked me to cover Halo 5: Guardians because the argument in our group chat wasn’t really about story or sandbox balance. It was about frame rate, resolution and what Microsoft’s hardware actually let 343 Industries get away…
# Sea of Thieves Right, so this one caused a proper row on the Discord. Tim wanted to write this because he only got an Xbox two years ago and thinks Sea of Thieves is the second coming. Sam wanted to write it because he’s convinced the combat is fundamentally broken and wanted three thousand words proving it with frame data from PvP encounters. John wanted to write it because he loves defending games everyone…
Marcus is writing this one because Sam wanted to break down the parry timing frame by frame (he did, we will get to that), Joe kept trying to compare the boss fights to Contra on Genesis (there is a point there, but not the one he thinks he is making), and John just wants everyone to admit that a game this punishing has no business also being this beautiful. Carl asked me to sort out…
# Forza Horizon 3 Timothy here, and I need to admit something upfront. I came to Forza Horizon 3 in 2026 with basically zero racing game history behind me. Carl keeps telling me I need to play Gran Turismo for “proper context” and Sam won’t stop mentioning frame data for rival AI cars like I’m supposed to understand what that means for a driving game. I don’t. What I do understand is whether a game…
Tim got handed this one because Carl wanted, in his exact words, “someone who wasn’t going to spend four paragraphs comparing the Lancer to the original Lancer from 2006.” That’s fair. I never touched a Gears game growing up. My first real session with this franchise happened last year on a secondhand Xbox One S, bought off a mate who’d moved on to a Series X and forgotten he still owned half a dozen games…