Aftermath Hours

Today Gita and Chris are joined by our good friend Stella to talk about job precarity in the Game Dev world and her own recent troubles getting screwed over. Then we discuss Pokopia, the best game on the Nintendo Switch 2, which manages to fuse what we enjoyed about both Viva Piñata, NieR, and Dragon Quest Builders? We then answer your reader questions!

Credits
- Hosts: Gita Jackson, Chris Person, and special guest Stella Sacco
- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude
- Subscribe to Aftermath!

About The Show
Aftermath Hours is the flagship podcast of Aftermath, a worker-owned, subscription-based website covering video games, the internet, and everything that comes after from journalists who previously worked at Kotaku, Vice, and The Washington Post. Each week, games journalism veterans Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, Riley MacLeod, and Gita Jackson – though not always all at once, because that’s too many people for a podcast – break down video game news, Remember Some Games, and learn about Chris’ frankly incredible number of special interests. Sometimes we even bring on guests from both inside and outside the video game industry! I don’t know what else to tell you; it’s a great time. Simply by reading this description, you’re already wasting time that you could be spending listening to the show. Head to aftermath.site for more info.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Luke are joined by Jack Ryan – the investigative journalist, as opposed to the Tom Clancy character – to discuss his months-in-the-making report on Clickout, a secretive company that has taken to buying up once-revered video game websites like The Escapist and filling them with AI and gambling. Why is Clickout so secretive? How is it getting away with this? Why target video game websites, specifically? What does a company get out of burying them in borderline-incoherent garbage? And what goes into reporting out this kind of story when a company has proven more than willing to bare its legal fangs at others in the past? We answer all those questions and more — and then we choose which video game characters we’d like to preside over us in court, should it come to that.

Credits
- Hosts: Nathan Grayson, Luke Plunkett, and special guest Jack Ryan
- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude
- Subscribe to Aftermath!

About The Show
Aftermath Hours is the flagship podcast of Aftermath, a worker-owned, subscription-based website covering video games, the internet, and everything that comes after from journalists who previously worked at Kotaku, Vice, and The Washington Post. Each week, games journalism veterans Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, Riley MacLeod, and Gita Jackson – though not always all at once, because that’s too many people for a podcast – break down video game news, Remember Some Games, and learn about Chris’ frankly incredible number of special interests. Sometimes we even bring on guests from both inside and outside the video game industry! I don’t know what else to tell you; it’s a great time. Simply by reading this description, you’re already wasting time that you could be spending listening to the show. Head to aftermath.site for more info.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this week’s episode, Nathan is joined by two media luminaries, Polygon editor-at-large Giovanni Colantonio and freelancer/Aftermath columnist Joshua Rivera, to discuss all things Resident Evil: where it’s coming from, where it’s going, and of course, the newly released Resident Evil Requiem. The series has spent its past few installments promising a fresh start; does Requiem actually deliver, or is it lured astray by the siren’s call of Leon Kennedy-flavored nostalgia? And during an era that’s decidedly post-zombie, what makes this series, in particular, so enduring? Also, Giovanni’s review of Requiem, which put the game in conversation with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drew some pretty vocal criticism online. We discuss whether or not the text of the game actually supports that kind of close thematic read. Finally, we come up with some truly diabolical remake ideas for old-school games and conclude that there’s actually no such thing as a long or short game. Who needs to stick around for 100 hours when you can make your own ending whenever you want to?

Credits
- Hosts: Nathan Grayson, and special guests Joshua Rivera and Giovanni Colantino
- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude
- Subscribe to Aftermath!

About The Show
Aftermath Hours is the flagship podcast of Aftermath, a worker-owned, subscription-based website covering video games, the internet, and everything that comes after from journalists who previously worked at Kotaku, Vice, and The Washington Post. Each week, games journalism veterans Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, Riley MacLeod, and Gita Jackson – though not always all at once, because that’s too many people for a podcast – break down video game news, Remember Some Games, and learn about Chris’ frankly incredible number of special interests. Sometimes we even bring on guests from both inside and outside the video game industry! I don’t know what else to tell you; it’s a great time. Simply by reading this description, you’re already wasting time that you could be spending listening to the show. Head to aftermath.site for more info.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Chris, and Riley find themselves tangled in a rat king of interrelated AI stories: leftists apparently hate technology because they’re rejecting AI (and the mass exploitation that comes with it), the computer – a theoretically magical device hijacked by tech industry perverts – has become massively more expensive as a result of AI, and a former indie games luminary has dived into the deep end of AI psychosis and given agents free reign to blow $10,000 on the stock market. Keeping in mind that AI is nothing but stringing together sentences by predicting words at mass scale, we maintain a theme by moving along to prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, which also had a big week with the former announcing Substack integration. How is “data” that arises from what is functionally just gambling useful to writers, news organizations, or anyone? Beats us! But here we are. Finally, we answer an all-timer of a mailbag question: “How many owls would you have to see in a day before you thought something weird was going on?”

Credits
- Hosts: Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, and Riley MacLeod
- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude
- Subscribe to Aftermath!

About The Show
Aftermath Hours is the flagship podcast of Aftermath, a worker-owned, subscription-based website covering video games, the internet, and everything that comes after from journalists who previously worked at Kotaku, Vice, and The Washington Post. Each week, games journalism veterans Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, Riley MacLeod, and Gita Jackson – though not always all at once, because that’s too many people for a podcast – break down video game news, Remember Some Games, and learn about Chris’ frankly incredible number of special interests. Sometimes we even bring on guests from both inside and outside the video game industry! I don’t know what else to tell you; it’s a great time. Simply by reading this description, you’re already wasting time that you could be spending listening to the show. Head to aftermath.site for more info.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this week’s episode, Gita and Luke welcome special guest Brendan Caldwell of the newly-launched website jank.cool, which is all about PC gaming. Brendan is quickly learning how owning a website can be both exciting (you’re your own boss, no one else can tell you what to do or what to write about) and very scary (how even do websites work?). But if it gives you a place to publish your weird trauma about getting attacked by Australian magpies under the guise of reviewing video games, the rest of it is worth it. Then in video game land - aside from the usual layoffs updates, a horrifically normal thing - Luke gives us his impressions of Romeo Is A Dead Man, Gita’s got strong feelings about the romance options in Cyberpunk 2077, Brendan’s trolling his friends in co-op auto mechanic sim Car Service Together, and Overwatch is back in all of our lives (much to Luke’s ire & dissociation). And in the Mailbag we’ll reveal the ratio of dead-body cleanup requests to demo mixtapes we receive on behalf of other businesses also named Aftermath, and recruit other orphaned video game mascot characters to send to the Olympics.

Credits
- Hosts: Gita Jackson, Luke Plunkett, and special guest Brendan Caldwell
- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude
- Subscribe to Aftermath!

About The Show
Aftermath Hours is the flagship podcast of Aftermath, a worker-owned, subscription-based website covering video games, the internet, and everything that comes after from journalists who previously worked at Kotaku, Vice, and The Washington Post. Each week, games journalism veterans Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person, Riley MacLeod, and Gita Jackson – though not always all at once, because that’s too many people for a podcast – break down video game news, Remember Some Games, and learn about Chris’ frankly incredible number of special interests. Sometimes we even bring on guests from both inside and outside the video game industry! I don’t know what else to tell you; it’s a great time. Simply by reading this description, you’re already wasting time that you could be spending listening to the show. Head to aftermath.site for more info.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.