Game Fix Show · Evergreen Podcasts

Mario Just Made It Big

·1 hr 30 min·5 clips

Ninja Gaiden predates Dark Souls and is more akin to Armored Core—it's a different lineage of action game design.

It starts in familiar Game Fix fashion. The room fills up with greetings, self-introductions, and reminders to check out GameFixShow.com, Facebook, Twitch, and Patreon, while the live audience gets thanked more than once as the table settles into the loose rhythm the show does best. Halloween week gets a nod, and a DeLorean popcorn bucket sends the conversation on a small playful detour before the panel locks into the main topic. The talk drifts toward shooters. One speaker argues that the genre is crowded now, with every series surviving by clinging to a small identity hook, whether that is Gears of War's crouch-and-cover posture, Halo's moon-jump feel, shields, and environment, or another game leaning on a single trick that only lasts so long. The pace gets rough. The conversation keeps circling the idea that first-person design has hit a ceiling, because once you can already move and shoot in 3D, everything else starts to feel like a ladder grab or some other quick-time event. VR comes up as the supposed next step. From there the panel spins through the claim that you either keep making the same game until it dies or mutate it so completely it becomes something else, and the examples come fast: Splitgate as a gimmick that does not hold, Call of Duty as the rare series that can borrow a mechanic without getting laughed off the field, Battlefield as the familiar comparison point, and Titanfall as the one idea that had something cool going before EA priorities pushed things elsewhere. They keep coming back to feel. The arguments are not abstract, because the real evidence for everyone in the room is how the controller feels, how the environment supports movement, and whether the mechanics still make a fresh kind of mess on the stick. The tone stays unruly. Interruptions, profanity used as punctuation, and half-finished comparisons keep folding back into the same argument about what a shooter can still be. The ending goes off the rails. A Superman debate takes over, and the group lands on the most gloriously unhelpful consensus possible: ignore reality, disagree anyway, and keep laughing while the logic falls apart. Then it wraps. The sign-off comes with the usual thanks to live viewers and downloaders, another plug for the site, and the show's goofy farewell, leaving the episode as a brisk, messy table talk about games, game feel, and the habits people cannot stop defending.

As heard by us

A loose game chat that still gets to why major shooters feel different.

Game Fix Show settles into an easy conversation about shooter design and why certain series still feel separate. After the greetings and Halloween week chatter, the panel moves through movement feel, old habits, and the different ways Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, and…

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Why you'd press play

You want a messy shooter debate that ends in a ridiculous Superman verdict.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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