FunFactor
Ty Schalter (VICE, FiveThirtyEight) and Aidan Moher (WIRED, Vulture) review what rocked and what sucked about the classic video game magazines that inspired them to become professional journalists, authors, and critics—and what they can tell us about today's digital media and games. New episodes drop every other Tuesday!
Episodes
OLD GLORY GAMING/MUSIC/SPORTS APPAREL, USE PROMO CODE “FUESDAY” FOR 15 PERCENT OFF: https://oldglory.com/
With just a handful of active consoles, and a dearth of post-launch games for both XBox and GameCube, 2002 might have been the most difficult year in...
“What Happened to Hyper Magazine” at Forgotten Worlds: https://www.forgottenworlds.net/hyper-magazine-part-1
Alice Ruppert on Bluesky starting a Romance novel/Visual Novel discussion: https://bsky.app/profile/malicedafirenze.bsky.social/post/3mvac2sw6b22q
Tube Cody’s “Defying Gravity” in Roller Co...
RAVNIR “VIKING MUSIC:” https://ravnirmusic.com/
TALES FROM THE BACKLOG’S QUEST 64 EPISODE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcoIOr8n8Ow
TALES FROM THE BACKLOG’S “DO GAMES ‘HOLD UP’” EPISODE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WIYcO82qRA
Are critical re-evaluations “over...
GREG’S PATREON: Greg Sewart | creating Generation 16 | Let's Read Videos | Retro Game Streams | Patreon
Free ULTRA Review Crew bonus episode?! That's right: Aidan and Ty had holiday and start-of-school stuff get in the way of recording last week, so we decided to re-start our content pipelines by giving everyone a tas...
THE KINGDOM HEARTS GOOGLE DOC: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQgJT19xfHJtEnIiZ-c55ClvAXn95ODUQBDYFtWF8GtPzHvTUTQhbH3brFk290zaQ/pub
THE KINGDOM HEARTS PRACTICAL COMPLETE ORDER (by Jackson from Abnormal Mapping): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eQpUmDR18WWFRpzyPjh8Ivv8gAE4IzVdxY1bgbm7YgM/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.iqj61wt...
PIXELS & POLYGONS QUARTERLY + ANNUAL COLLECTION: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/darrenhupke/pixels-and-polygons-quarterly-2026-q4-and-annual-collection?ref=3opks3
LIE OF CAELUM: SPIRIT KICKSTARTER: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lieofcaelumspirit/lie-of-caelum-spirit
BEL’S FANFARE KICKSTARTER: https...
Stop Skeletons From Fighting’s “My 2 Year Journey to Solve the 30-Year Myth of Faceball 2000” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2AG-gAuS-U&t=6058s
Aidan’s back in the saddle, and he’s got takes about what Ty talked about with last episode’s guest-host Jess Voidburger–but ...
SONIC ON THE COVER OF NINTENDO POWER??
Special guest host Jess VoidBurger joins Ty to revisit Nintendo’s legendary in-house publication during its awkward tween years: still clinging to some of the looks and features of its 16-bit glory days, but starting to evolve to compete with the super-professional, grownuppy output o...
Super Smash Bros. Melee is Nintendo’s tightest, deepest, most technically rewarding fighting game of all time, with an active playerbase and tournament scene still uncovering its secrets.
But what did reviewers make of it in 2002, when “lets put all the characters and properties we own in one game” wasn’t an o...
Console exclusivity was the talk of this recent Summer Game Fest, and Aidan and Ty start off the episode with a discussion of their most badly missed-out-on exclusives from platforms they didn't have.
And then, the issue: With Future Publishing/Imagine Media getting the "official" XBox magazine tag, Ziff-Davis launched an "independen...
(sped-up audio was Ty's fault; it's been fixed!)
FINAL. FANTASY. X. After the final PS1 release was a mechanical, graphical, and literary callback to the deepest roots of the series, the first PS2 release set the tone for what this series would look–and, to an extent, play–like for the next quarter-century of HD video and streamed...
GREG’S PATREON: Greg Sewart | creating Generation 16 | Let's Read Videos | Retro Game Streams | Patreon
Please enjoy this snippet of our first Season Two ULTRA Review Crew bonus episode, where we're throwing it back to, um, the disastrous 1995 surprise launch of the Sega Saturn in North America??
That&rsquo...
XBOX OFFICIAL MAGAZINE: MAGAZINES EVOLVED.
We had to stay in January 2002 for one more episode this season, because we just couldn’t overlook XBox Offical Magazine’s massive walkthrough for Halo: Combat Evolved. We also couldn’t overlook the fact that Imagine Media/Future U.S. Publishing launched...
January 2002 was all killer, no filler! EGM kicked off the new year by revisiting their Top 100 games of all time, and we take a look at the changes since their last attempt (which we covered last season)!
But EGM also ranked their worst 20 games of all time, thanks to freelancer Seanbaby, and we start the episode with a ...
SEASON TWO: RISE OF THE CORPOS has arrived! We've skipped forward in time to the dawn of a new era - where the dorky world leader in business software, Microsoft, has dropped a massive black-and-neon-green bomb on a gaming industry.
Likewise, the games media's shift to both an older target audience and parallel online coverage means a lot of beloved magazines are de...
Coury and Try from My Life in Gaming join us to snake-draft our way through the Generation Gap--building four 'teams' of five games each released across all game systems and regions during our first-season time period.
The competition was friendly but fierce, with plenty of you-took-my-picks and even more surprise curveballs! We all walked away...
QUIZ LINK: https://forms.gle/9cFPG8EsJesFAEB59
BILLY BAKER’S 2007 BOSTON GLOBE PIECE ON HIS WIFE SECRETLY BEING THE WORLD’S BEST TETRIS PLAYER: https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/
Our Season 1 wrap-up extravaganza has never been more extravagant: Chris and Eric from Retrograde Amnesia j...
As an extra-special treat, Ty also reveals the (published!) letter he sent in to Game Players back in the day. Cringe level: ...
Starting with a quick look back at the first year of FunFactor, and discussion of what’s coming next, we then re-looked at the magazine we debuted the podcast with nearly a year ago, PSM No. 1.
EGM DOCUMENTARY BY MY LIFE IN GAMING & GAME SACK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E010OPY1Tzw
Everybody’s favorite* N64 game ever is here: GoldenEye 007! But did Game Informer’s weird four-voice feature review system capture all the excitement at release?
*if you didn’t have a PC capable of playing first-...
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