ALT: Psych Gus: Eating Your Feelings

A Junior Library Guild Selection "Highly recommended for readers passionate about activism." -- SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, Starred Review "Sure to inspire today's youthful generation of tenacious change...

Garfield has spent decades perfecting one skill: refusing to leave the couch. So of course Hollywood sent him to England, handed him a royal lookalike, and made him the most reluctant cat in the histo...

Garfield has spent decades perfecting one skill: refusing to leave the couch. So of course Hollywood sent him to England, handed him a royal lookalike, and made him the most reluctant cat in the history of the monarchy. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is a movie about mistaken identity, a very large castle, and a cat whose idea of a crown jewel is anything left unattended on a buffet table. Naturally, a video game was in order. The Nintendo DS got its own version, and so did the PlayStation 2, which means this cat managed to be a tiny royal on your lap and a tiny royal on your TV. Not many orange cartoon cats can say they've been in two different living rooms at once without moving. Joining us to sort through the royal mess is Chris Maynard from Following Films. Chris knows his way around a movie, which makes him ideal for the question at the heart of this episode: when you turn a movie about a cat pretending to be a prince into a game, does the cat get to keep pretending, or does he just end up running down hallways? Chris is here to tell us whether this is a proper adaptation or a very loud costume party. So polish your crown, put the snacks within reach, and let's find out whether A Tail of Two Kitties is a game fit for a king or one that should have stayed incognito.

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By the time Digimon World 3 rolled around in 2002, a franchise that started as an egg-shaped virtual pet and spun off into a manga and an anime around the same time had picked up enough separate games and separate continuities that keeping any of it straight had apparently stopped being a priority. At least one reviewer we found says flat-out that the game gets its own canon wrong in places, which at this point feels less like a flaw and more like a house style. You play a kid named Junior, no last name, no further explanation, who gets pulled into a server with three Digimon partners, though only one is allowed to actually fight at a time while the other two wait their turn. Enemies show up completely at random now too, so unlike earlier games in the series, you can't just spot trouble on the map and calmly walk the other way. Take enough hits and your blast meter fills up, letting a Digimon go Blast Digivolve and get meaner for a while, or you can combine two Digimon with DNA Digivolve to create something new that fires off one big attack and then immediately splits back apart. There's also a full card battle game built right into the RPG, all 314 cards of it, so between fetch quests you'll have plenty of downtime to build a deck. Joining us to help sort through all of it is Chels Eichholz, who co-hosts The Q Division, a James Bond rewatch podcast, and Across the Whoniverse, a Doctor Who marathon show that "kidnaps" a new companion every episode to explore a different corner of sixty-plus years of continuity. Between those two franchises, Chels has plenty of practice diving into a huge tangle of lore and coming out the other side having a genuinely great time, which makes them the perfect person to take on a game that's basically nothing but tangled lore. So dig up an old memory card, pick which one of your three Digimon gets to have a personality this round, and let's find out whether Digimon World 3 earned its spot in Digimon history, or whether it should've DNA Digivolved into something else entirely.

Alt: Louise Belcher - Evil Laugh

Most podcast guests call in from a spare bedroom, a closet lined with winter coats, or a parked car outside a grocery store. Josh Garvey is joining us from the middle of a black hole. On the bright si...

Most podcast guests call in from a spare bedroom, a closet lined with winter coats, or a parked car outside a grocery store. Josh Garvey is joining us from the middle of a black hole. On the bright side, the room tone is fantastic. Nothing echoes when nothing, light included, is allowed to leave. It's also a fitting backdrop, because this episode is all about taking an adventure you used to play and asking it to sit still on a page. Somebody looked at a whole quest built on mashing buttons and said, "What if the only button left was 'turn the page'?" The bravest thing you can do is lick your thumb. That's a bold leap from the action genre to the paper-cut genre, and we're going to take a hard look at The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in comic form. Josh has agreed to walk us through it from beyond the event horizon, where time runs a bit slow, so by the time you hear this he's technically still on his first sentence. That also makes him the only guest we've ever had who can offer a genuine link to the past, a pun I've been sitting on since the moment he said yes. We had to be careful with the mic placement, since anything left within Josh's reach gets stretched into a very long strand of spaghetti. Lesson learned about the pop filter. So please keep your arms, legs, and any nearby light inside the episode at all times, and don't panic if the audio shows up a few billion years late. Nobody has ever returned from a black hole to leave a bad review, which honestly might be the best business model in podcasting.

When the going gets tough and everybody is trying to keep you from getting what you deserve, someone has to have your back. You just might not like what they're doing to make sure you're safe.

Every generation needs a reminder that games-based-on-movies-based-on-comics are their own strange little ecosystem, and Hellboy: The Science of Evil is a proud, slightly confused citizen of it. It doesn't adapt either del Toro movie directly. Instead it just borrows the general vibe, invents its own plot, and trusts you to recognize a giant stone fist and a wisecracking demon without needing either film's actual story. It's the video game equivalent of a cover band that only plays originals. And that giant stone fist deserves a moment, because it's doing some real character-design heavy lifting. Hellboy is built around exactly one absurdly oversized body part, and that's basically the whole design manual for a certain flavor of comic book tough guy: pick one appendage, blow it up past the point of reason, let the silhouette do the talking. Todd McFarlane ran the identical play with Spawn, except he went south instead of north, handing us a hero who could probably punt a sedan but might struggle to tie his own laces. One big fist, one big boot. Same weird design instinct, opposite ends of the body. Which is a good excuse to bring in George Marston of Spawnography, the podcast where Pierce Lydon joins in to spend their time in the giant-boot corner of that exact design philosophy. George is flying solo this round to see how a giant fist holds up against a their usual task of studying a giant boot. So pick your favorite oversized body part, brace for a beat-em-up that seems mildly allergic to its own source material, and let's find out whether The Science of Evil earns a place next to del Toro's films, or whether it belongs exactly where most tie-in games end up: forgotten. And don't forget about the Nazi occultism.

Alt: Adventures of the Little Koala skating

Let’s just say it up front: turning a trading card game into a video game is a magic trick where the “trading” and the “card” both quietly slip out the back door, leaving you with a menu that goes “di...

Let's just say it up front: turning a trading card game into a video game is a magic trick where the "trading" and the "card" both quietly slip out the back door, leaving you with a menu that goes "ding" when you win. And Marvel decided this was worth doing not once, but on two separate handhelds that weren't even talking to each other, like a superhero team-up where nobody checked who else was showing up. Somewhere, someone looked at the specific joy of slapping a foil Spider-Man card down on a table hard enough to rattle the juice boxes, and said: what if we replaced that with a stylus tap? What if deck-building, the sacred art of jamming eighty cards into a rubber band and hoping for the best, became a scroll menu instead? Visionary. Extremely quiet. Nobody's little brother has ever stormed off in a rage over a scroll menu. Dealing me in for this one is Gen Moonen, co-host of the "Fun" & Games Podcast alongside Matt Storm, a show built entirely around two people who genuinely, unapologetically love games, which honestly should be a requirement for every gaming podcast and somehow still isn't. So grab a deck, or a controller, or whatever the modern version of "shuffle and pray" is, and let's find out if Marvel Trading Card Game is a genuinely good time, or a lesson in why some hobbies were never meant to leave the kitchen table.

Every kid who ever begged a parent for money to hit GameStop on release day understands the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship series in their bones: it's the same card game, sold back to you once a year, wearing a slightly fancier hat each time. Konami ran this bit from 2003 to 2006 with the discipline of a Swiss watchmaker and the restraint of absolutely nobody when it came to naming the things. Four games! Four years! Somehow four completely different amounts of the word "World Championship" crammed into each title! And somewhere in that run, things got weird. By the last entry, Konami had apparently decided Yugi, Kaiba, and the rest of the cast had done enough work, and quietly let you duel the actual monster cards instead, like the whole show got replaced by its own trading cards in some kind of legal dispute. There's also a tiny RPG town nobody asked for, a cartridge somehow refereeing six languages at once, and just enough real cardboard cards taped inside the box that there's a real argument the packaging outsold the game. Grabbing a seat at the table to help me sort genuine dueling nostalgia from pure cardboard-fueled compulsion is William Morgan, host of The Geek Gauntlet Podcast, self-billed as the fastest hour in podcasting, a claim that tracks given how fast he and the crew burn through a week's worth of comics, movies, anime, and gaming news. So keep an eye on your Life Points, don't forget your face-downs, and let's find out if the World Championship series was Konami's finest run of Game Boy dueling, or just years of very well-packaged déjà vu.