First Gen Gamers

Once video games proved they weren't a fad, it was inevitable they'd cross into movies and TV. But the average show couldn't just show footage of Super Mario or Sonic without paying rights fees. That's where fake video games come in. You've seen them, from comedy to horror, on TV and in the theater. And today, Ashley and Jed are talking about the most memorable fake games in pop culture. What are they and where ...

Nintendo is the oldest console manufacturer in video games, and one of the longest running developers and publishers of games alongside Activision. They are the house of gaming franchises that even non-gamers know about. With the recent official unveiling of the Switch 2, we thought it would be a good time to give Nintendo flowers for all they've done over the years. So this episode, Ash and Jed celebrate the very best of Ninte...

Making a good product is only half the battle. It also has to be marketed. The best thing in the world can languish on the shelf if nobody knows it exists. Worse yet, sometimes the marketing does the product dirty; it misrepresents the product, or obscures it entirely with a stupid stunt. On this episode of First Gen Gamers, Ash and Jed take a look at when video game companies blow it with the marketing. Lies, PR disasters, poor ti...

While the gaming community can rally and close ranks when it is accosted by outsiders, it is remarkably quick to devour itself over the dumbest perceived slights. Within the game, on social media, on YouTube, or in real life, gamers can get exceptionally petty when they want to. On this episode, Ashley and Jed look at some examples of when gamers get petty; some are hilarious, some are ridiculous, and some are controversial and lif...

What happens when Ashley is out sick for recording, but there's a schedule to keep? A guest host! Laceya Finley from Super Mega Crash Beyond steps into the cohost #2 slot, and since she's a lover of FMV games, that's the topic we explore. Where it all started with Dragon's Lair, the awkward 90's games that didn't know what to do, and how the genre has changed in modern day. It's a genre a lot of gamers h...

Simulator games started humbly. Run a city. Run an airport. Run a theme park. Somewhere along the way, they became something more. You can be a bee. A forklift operator. A goat. A gas station owner. A rock. The possibilities have become endless. In this episode, Ashley and Jed take a look at simulation games. Games they've played, the way the genre has exploded in recent times, and the disturbing, dark (but silly) corridors the gen...

Gaming is full of licensed games. You might not think of Madden or WWE or Marvel's Spider-Man as licensed games, but they are. Licensed games have been around since the beginning, which means there's plenty of good ones, and plenty of bad ones. But it's way too easy to identify those. What about the weird ones? The ones that make no sense as a game? The games that don't seem to know what the original source material was? The licens...

What makes a fictional character scary? It's hard to say. Dracula is often portrayed as intelligent, sophisticated, even sexy, while Frankenstein's monster is hulking and brutish, but Dracula is somehow scarier. The AI-driven robot version of Chucky from 2019's Child's Play remake isn't scary, but when that doll is possessed by a desperate serial killer stalking a six year old, that's scary. It's hard to pin down what makes one cha...

Who doesn't love their boss? Okay, some of us don't. Okay, a lot of us don't. Most of us would love to go Stone Cold Steve Austin and beat up our boss. Instead, we have to settle for beating bosses in video games, and when it's done right, it can be the best part of a video game. Testing the culmination of your skills and abilities, the narrative building to a point and then the cathartic release … or maybe the boss...

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to video game art, sometimes, objectivity goes right out the window if the character looks like they fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. On this episode of First Gen Gamers, Ashley and Jed are talking bad video game character design. The grotesque, the broken, the stupid, the confusing, and the controversial. Who made the list? Only ...

Kids today don't know what it was like back in the day to play a game with a friend and have them be in the same room. On this episode of First Gen Gamers, Jed and Ashley are celebrating the magic of hanging with your buds and chillin' on the couch, playing games together. They're looking for that one game in each console generation that best symbolizes the joy of couch co-op gameplay. What games did they pick? Listen a...

Games inspire all sorts of emotions: fear, sadness, determination, longing. That's not what Jed and Ashley are exploring, though. On this episode, we're going through the console generations and talking about the games that inspired rage. The overly difficult, the tedious mechanics, the games that didn't follow up properly on previous chapters ... there's all sorts of reasons to be mad at a game. Jed and Ashley nomi...

February means Valentine's Day, the season of love. Gaming is full of love stories and romance, whether it's dating sims or Commander Shepard sleeping his way through half the galaxy in Mass Effect. But it's way too easy to list off good couples. How about BAD ones? That's right, Mike and Jed are celebrating Valentine's Day the opposite way, by going through gaming history and digging up the worst relationships ...