Play Comics

Wolverine is the best there is at what he does, and what he does is get stabbed, shot, and set on fire before shrugging it off and asking where the nearest bar is. His healing factor makes him the only character in comics who can have a terrible day, a worse day, and a questionable haircut, and still be back to normal by Tuesday. It’s easily the most relatable power in the Marvel universe, provided you’ve ever tried to recover from a long weekend.

This episode is about X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a game built on the idea that a man with an indestructible skeleton has somehow misplaced his own backstory. He’s got amnesia, a grudge, and a tank top collection that suggests he’s never once been cold. It’s a story about a guy trying to remember who he is, told in a medium where the answer is usually “the one who’s yelling and tearing through everything within reach.”

Helping us sort through the rage and the sideburns is Grant Stoye, the comic writer behind some of your favorite independently released comics and one of the minds behind the currently running Kickstarter for Yule Volume 2. Grant knows a thing or two about Wolverine-level resilience. Independent creators bounce back from deadlines, printer quotes, and shipping costs that would flatten lesser mutants, and their healing factor runs on coffee and optimism. If anyone can tell us whether a hero who survives everything can still keep a story interesting, it’s a guy who makes comics happen with no safety net and a lot of heart.

Bring a bandage you won’t need, hide anything made of paper, and let’s find out whether this one earns its snikt or just growls a lot and leaves.

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.

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.