Gaming talk with excellent detours.
We Were Gamers follows a familiar group conversation that starts with games and wanders wherever the week actually went. Recent episodes move from Mugenics, Hollow Knight, Magic cards, and Xbox frustration into movie spoilers, Disney trips, Doritos, pool renovation, F1 rules, and CPU nostalgia.
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We Were Gamers is a long-running conversational show where games are the starting point, not the boundary. The speakers return to games with real attention. Mugenics gets parsed through mechanics, naming choices, frustration, and absurd emergent moments. Hollow Knight prompts talk about boss patterns, charms, healing windows, and when a fight is meant to wait until later. Magic: The Gathering appears through Arena packs, card art, reprints, paper play, and the questionable wisdom of pizza near cards. Xbox trouble and Windows annoyances fit naturally beside that. The show is not arranged like a clean bulletin. It moves like a weekly table conversation with a strong memory and a low tolerance for flimsy logic. One minute, trailer culture and spoiler etiquette are being argued with comic force. The next, a custom shirt order becomes a surprisingly detailed breakdown of fabric, cuffs, collars, measurements, and value over time. Food gets inspected with the same intensity. Cool ranch dust, rolled chips, ranch shakes, pizza crust dipping, and snack texture all become fair game. So do home projects. A pool renovation turns into talk about decomposed granite, compaction, slopes, rocks, concrete edges, and the realities of making a yard usable. Sports and racing drift in too, from football coaching choices to F1 rules that make the cars feel strangely automated. The show also keeps its production life visible, including backup microphones, Discord overlays, OBS, YouTube recordings, and the minor disasters of remote recording. That transparency gives it a lived-in feel. It is casual, but not empty. The pleasure comes from hearing gaming culture treated as one part of a larger adult hobby ecosystem: hardware, media, snacks, home maintenance, sports complaints, and the eternal problem of getting technology to behave. We Were Gamers works best for people who like games discussed by people who also have errands, families, equipment problems, strong snack opinions, and unfinished projects.
Made for: For people who enjoy conversational gaming podcasts that make room for movies, tech hassles, tabletop habits, snacks, sports, and everyday projects. It especially suits listeners who prefer familiar back-and-forth over polished industry recap.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the texture of the side conversations: games sit beside custom tailoring, pool renovation, F1 rules, Doritos, Discord overlays, and spoiler etiquette without feeling like separate shows. The result feels specific, lived-in, and unusually good at turning minor details into running debates.
Old friends reflect on their history with gaming and try to keep up while they grow up - games, movies, shows, and more.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
We Were Gamers makes games and PC hardware legible through detailed, funny conversation about the pleasures and frustrations of using them.
We Were Gamers turns technology talk into an ongoing conversation among Andy, Michael and JJ, with games and PC hardware sharing space with movies, food disputes and home projects.
A crying cat gets a Mugenics joke; you might like game talk this ready to wander.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Spoiler arguments give way to custom tailoring, cloth choices, and an F1 crash.
The episode starts with a spoiler argument around Wake Up Dead Man, then settles into the idea that other people's opinions are not spoilers. It works best when the discussion stays tied to specific examples rather than drifting into abstraction, and the joking still has…
A loose return built on banter, travel stories, and one oddly punctuated game title.
We Were Gamers 491 settles into an easy catch-up after a scheduling hiccup, with Andy flagging the backup mic issue and the hosts easing back into their usual banter.
Game talk that moves from healing locks to pizza cards without losing its grip.
This episode settles into a factory of silliness, moving from Mugenics Act 2 irritation into a long run of card-game and pizza-card absurdity.
Measles jokes, RAM-price grumbling, and a 486 nod lead into game mechanics and dream-boss talk.
Episode 486 opens in grimly comic fashion, pairing measles-at-the-park chatter with Windows 11 trouble before settling into the easy rhythm of processor jokes.
Football second-guessing, decomposed-granite problem-solving, and a Tolkien airplane detour turn the episode's wandering shape into its main appeal.
Episode 485 works best as conversational drift with a reliable comic motor. Broncos second-guessing slides into the practical business of raising ground to a concrete level with decomposed granite, then the closing stretch moves through Kiki, YouTube, email, and J.R.R.
Old PC cases, GPU fit, and a quiet Uematsu sendoff keep the banter grounded.
This episode turns a mock courtroom into a long, specific back-and-forth over old PC cases and whether modern GPUs still fit. J.J. Krasiding serves as judge while Michael and Andy work through a Fractal Meshify 2 Compact, a 3080 Ti, a possible 4090 problem, and the familiar…
The hosts discuss their ongoing technical difficulties with recording equipment and computer upgrades.
Food Court Episode 422 opens with J.J.
Michael and JJ discuss Michael's slow recovery from pneumonia, the benefits of morning walks, and his two-month break from caffeine.
The hosts discuss their New Year's tradition of celebrating with different cultures' foods and teas, starting with chai.
The hosts banter about a song reference before transitioning to discuss Ranney C.
We Were Gamers episode 492 opens with a spoiler argument, as the hosts call trailers "a scam" and debate whether advance knowledge changes the moviegoing experience.
On We Were Gamers 491, "Backup Mic Week," Andy, Michael, and JJ spend most of the episode on Formula 1's battery-heavy rule changes, which they say have produced random spins, lost straight-line power, and a split between fans who love the chaos and fans who hate it.
Hosts Andy, JJ, and Michael discuss recent gaming, opening with Andy's playthrough of the roguelike Mugenics, including a boss fight in which he tricked two enemies into attacking each other until one died.
Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond leave Xbox leadership, while a new CEO from Microsoft's AI division takes over.
Mu Genix sends four recruited cats through Slay the Spire-style maps and grid-based tactical fights.
Episode 487 of We Were Gamers opens with complaints about Discord's face-scan or government-ID age check and AI-heavy Super Bowl ads, including a Jurassic Park spot with de-aged actors.
We Were Gamers episode 486 opens with a measles check tied to confirmed park visitors and then moves into a long argument about why RAM prices are rising, with Micron, AI companies, and business-to-business supply all named directly.
We Were Gamers episode 485, "Baba Hole," opens with Broncos coaching moves, Bill Belichick's Hall of Fame snub, and the hosts joking about Sam Darnold, the Patriots, and the Super Bowl.
The hosts discuss technical audio issues from previous episodes and the challenges of relearning best practices for recording.