Save State by Vertical Slice Games
Save State is the weekly podcast from Vertical Slice Games — sharp takes on the biggest stories in gaming, a look at what’s coming, and the weird stuff you didn’t know you needed to hear about. Hosted by Josh, new every Monday.
Episodes
BioWare is gone. After more than 30 years, Electronic Arts has closed the studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Jade Empire, and some of the most influential RPGs ever made. And just one day later, a leaked trailer for the canceled Mass Effect: Universe offered a painful glimpse of what might have been.
This week on Save State, Josh Lurie looks back at BioWare's extraordinary history, from three medical students working out of a ba...
Rockstar's original plans for Grand Theft Auto VI were so ambitious that even Rockstar had to scale them back. Bloomberg's new reporting reveals just how enormous Project Americas was supposed to be, how much the company has grown, and what it took to turn that vision into the game we're finally getting in November.
This week on Save State, Josh Lurie gets into Rockstar's abandoned ambitions, Activision's claim that Call of Duty doe...
Episode 5 of Save State. This week: Google and Unity want to make game development accessible to almost anyone through AI. That's exciting, but making a playable game and making a good game are two very different things. Josh talks about his own experience with AI, what these tools can actually accomplish, and why Steam's discovery problem could get much worse.
Then we look at Xbox's new XP division, Hollywood's growing interest in ...
Episode 4 of Save State. This week: Gears of War: E-Day is nearly here, The Coalition appears to have delivered, and we look at why successful game development can still leave teams worried about what comes after launch.
Then we dig into the live-service obsession that reshaped Sony, why ARC Raiders proves that success can create as many problems as failure, and what the shift from physical games to digital licenses really means for...
Episode 3 of Save State. This week: Bungie admits Marathon hasn’t found the audience it hoped for and puts Destiny back at the center of its future, Microsoft pushes deeper into its Xbox reset as Activision takes responsibility for Halo, and Silent Hill somehow completes one of gaming’s strangest franchise comebacks.
Plus: Control Resonant’s verdict is in, Well Dweller is quietly putting up huge review numbers, Gar...
Episode 2 of Save State. This week: a review-score deep dive on why Wolverine's 78 average is basically an insult, Blizzard's enormous bet on 2029 and 2030, a hard look at whether Bungie's Marathon can survive long enough to matter, and a story I didn't expect to be covering — what's actually happening at IGN.
New episodes every Monday.
Don't forget to check out VSG at verticalslicegames.com for video game reviews, news, and mu...
Welcome to the trailer episode of Save State, a new weekly podcast from Vertical Slice Games (VSG). I'm Josh, and I've spent almost a decade building VSG into an independent, no-nonsense game review aggregator and news outlet. This is the same thing, in your ears: no filler, no padding, just what's worth your time.
New episodes every Monday.
Don't forget to check out VSG at verticalslicegames.com for video game reviews, news,...
Episode 1 of Save State. This week: a horror game ships something that should never have made it past QA, Sony has a genuinely strange week losing its biggest auteur bet to Xbox, and I put the law degree to use on Nintendo's tariff-refund "sale." Plus verdicts, what's coming up, and the week's quick hits.
New episodes every Monday.
Don't forget to check out VSG at verticalslicegames.com for video game reviews, news, and much more. Th...
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