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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.
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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.Continue Reading

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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.Continue Reading

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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.Continue Reading

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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.
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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.Continue Reading

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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.Continue Reading

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Back in 1988, CBS gave us Garfield: His 9 Lives, an anthology special where our favorite lasagna enthusiast got to be a caveman, a pampered Egyptian god-cat, and an honest-to-goodness astronaut fending off an interstellar war fleet. Ambitious! Mythic, even! Then in 2006, Lucky Jump Games and The Game Factory looked at that legacy, borrowed the exact same title for a Game Boy Advance platformer, and said: actually, what if his nine lives were a farm, a haunted house, a circus, a sewer, a tree, an alley, an obedience school, and a lab? No pyramids. No space combat. Just Garfield, freshly stuffed from an eating binge, suffering eight increasingly damp nightmares about locations you could reach on foot from his own kitchen.

Climbing out of Garfield’s nightmare to help us survey the damage is Derek B Gayle, who hosts or co-hosts what feels like an ever-multiplying stable of shows including Walloping Websnappers, Gimmicks, Skreeonk!, and, at this point, so many other podcasts that keeping an accurate list may violate several laws of podcast physics. If Garfield hates Mondays, Derek looked at that same feeling and apparently decided the correct response was to start four more podcasts to fill the time.

So raid the fridge, settle in for a night you won’t remember fondly, and let’s find out if Garfield and His Nine Lives earned its spot next to the caveman, the pharaoh, and the astronaut, or if it should’ve stayed exactly the kind of dream you forget the second your alarm goes off.Continue Reading

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Let’s talk about the year 2007, when Ubisoft looked at Konami’s TMNT license, going up for grabs after three straight beat-em-ups, and said “yeah, we’ll take it,” the video game equivalent of adopting somebody else’s very large, very established pet. They tied the whole thing to Imagi’s brand new fully CGI turtle movie and then, in an act of scheduling chaos I can only respect, shipped the game three entire days before the film hit theaters. Bold! Confusing! Possibly the result of someone losing a calendar!

And then, because apparently one platform was never going to cut it, Ubisoft just kept going. PlayStation 2! GameCube! Xbox 360! Wii! PC! A PlayStation 3 version that got paraded around at trade shows like a prize pony and then quietly put out to pasture, never to be seen again! And just when you think the roster’s full, Nintendo DS and PSP roll in with an entirely separate game wearing the same name tag, because why make one turtle game when you could make several turtle games and let the consumer sort it out. Also, bonus points to whoever in marketing decided the title needed zero subtitles, zero colons, zero numbers, just “TMNT,” like it’s the only one that’s ever existed. Confidence!

Climbing out of the sewer to help me survey this multi-console fever dream is Jeremy Powers, host and creator of the Zenspath Entertainment Network, a man who apparently collects retro hardware, works as an engineer, and still finds time to run a podcast, which is either elite time management or a full refusal to acknowledge the concept of a day off.

So track down whichever version of this thing actually ended up in your house back in 2007, because statistically there’s a good chance it wasn’t the same one as your neighbor’s, and let’s find out if TMNT earned its spot in the turtle hall of fame, or if it should’ve stayed a trade show prototype.Continue Reading

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By the mid-2000s, Naruto had pulled off something most manga-to-anime properties never manage: it wasn’t just popular, it was everywhere, spinning off a small army of video games across nearly every system with a screen, like Naruto himself used Shadow Clone Jutsu on the entire games industry and nobody thought to stop him. Somewhere in that flood of Ninja Councils and Clash of Ninjas sits Naruto: Path of the Ninja, the entry that decided the best way to honor Kishimoto’s story wasn’t just punching (though there’s plenty of that too) but actually letting you live through the Land of Waves and the Chūnin Exams one turn-based battle at a time.

Path of the Ninja debuted on the Game Boy Advance in Japan back in 2004, then took a leisurely three years to reach American shelves in 2007, arriving on the Nintendo DS instead, because by the time they got around to localizing it, the GBA already felt like last decade’s news. You pick from six familiar faces, Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Shikamaru, Neji, and Rock Lee, pair them into formations for bonus combo attacks, and work through more than 90 jutsu, some of which you cast on the DS touchscreen by frantically scribbling a shape with the stylus, which is either a clever nod to hand seals or just a fun way to give yourself a cramp. The story runs all the way to the Chunin Exam invasion and a face-off with Shukaku, and if you’re wondering whether you can also fight Itachi as a secret bonus boss, the answer is: only if you own the Japanese version. The English release quietly deleted that fight but somehow forgot to scrub his name from the end credits, which is the video game equivalent of hiding a body and leaving the shovel leaning against the wall.

Making another through the Play Comics dojo is Merrilee O’Neil of Fear Coded, last seen on the show trying to keep pace with the Flash. This time she’s trading super speed for shadow clones, hand seals, and a Konoha headband, so at least the running is a little more sustainable.

So form your hand seals, grab your kunai pouch, and let’s find out if Path of the Ninja earned its headband as a worthy trip through early Naruto, or if it should’ve stayed back at the Academy with the rest of the genin.Continue Reading

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Let’s talk about Spider-Man 3, the movie where Sam Raimi looked at “menacing single antagonist” and said no thank you, I would like three, please, and also I would like Peter Parker to dance down the street like he’s auditioning for a jazz-hands cult. It’s a movie that tried to do everything, mostly succeeded at doing too much, and somehow still made enough money that Activision looked at it and thought: yes, this deserves not one video game, but two, spread across seven different consoles, so that literally nobody in 2007 could escape it. Ambitious! Chaotic! Extremely on brand for the source material!

See, there’s the fancy version, built by Treyarch for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, where you get a whole open Manhattan to swing around in and the black suit shows up only when the story deems you emotionally ready for it, very mature, very earned. And then there’s the completely different budget cousin, built by Vicarious Visions for PS2, Wii, PSP, GBA, and DS, where you can slap the black suit on whenever you feel like being a jerk, the Wii Remote gets to pretend it’s a web-shooter, and the DS throws the D-pad in the trash entirely so you can beat up Sandman by poking a touchscreen like it owes you money. Same cover art. Same villains. Practically strangers.

Swinging in to help me sort out how many wildly different versions of one questionable movie a single franchise can generate is Harry Steele, co-host of Games on Film, the podcast where he and his brother Rory spend their days grading movies based on video games! Which means Harry has built an entire professional skillset around asking “did Hollywood mess this up,” and today, for one glorious episode, we get to point that same energy directly back at a video game and ask if it managed to mess up the movie right back. Poetic justice! Content symmetry! Whatever you want to call it, it’s happening!

So grab whichever suit you’re feeling today, pick a console, any console, apparently they all made their own decisions, and let’s find out if the Spider-Man 3 games handled three villains and seven platforms with any more finesse than the movie handled three villains and one dance number.Continue Reading

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Video game licensing runs on a very simple equation: if a popular franchise exists, and a handheld system exists, someone will eventually put a game together and slap on a release date. That’s probably the story behind Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour, with Konami treating the whole affair with the enthusiasm of checking a box on an extremely profitable to-do list. It was the franchise’s first outing on the Nintendo DS, arriving with the confidence of a company that already knew the math worked.

The pitch itself barely needed a pitch meeting: take the actual Duel Monsters card game, cram in over a thousand cards, and let the DS’s two screens do what a real card table always wished it could, which is render your monsters in flashy 3D up top while the actual decision-making, deck construction, knowing what a Trap Card does, happens down on the touchscreen below. The story loosely resets you into a remixed version of a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament arc, because apparently even a game that’s essentially “trading card simulator” still needed somebody to kidnap somebody, and wireless dueling and card trading rounded things out for anyone who wanted to bankrupt a friend without leaving the couch.

Making the trip through Battle City with me is The Gaming Anthropologist, who’s been out in the field studying gaming culture the way some people study a subject that actually pays.

So build your deck, set a face-down card of your own choosing, and let’s find out whether Nightmare Troubadour actually captured what made Duel Monsters worth dueling over, or whether “the license existed and so did the hardware” was doing all the heavy lifting.Continue Reading

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By 2005, Konami had made three TMNT beat-em-ups based on the 2003 animated series, which is the kind of commitment usually reserved for tax filings or long-term relationships. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare landed that November on GameCube, PS2, Xbox, and Nintendo DS as the trilogy’s closer, and Konami sent it off in style by giving it the series’ first E10+ rating, as if four years of shell-based violence had finally crossed some invisible threshold of Too Much.

The game loosely adapts the show’s third season across four “Episodes,” which means the Triceratons invade Earth, Agent Bishop kidnaps Splinter for reasons that presumably made sense to somebody in a government facility somewhere, and Shredder shows back up to remind everyone that retirement isn’t really a thing that happens to ninja warlords. Along the way you can pour experience points into skill scrolls, transform into a Dino Turtle or an Ultimate Turtle depending on the mood, and, if you clear the first Episode, unlock a modified version of the 1991 arcade classic Turtles in Time, which is Konami’s way of saying “here’s the good one, in case this one doesn’t land.”

Joining me to sort the Triceratons from the Foot Ninjas is Pierce Lydon of Spawnography, the podcast where he and George Marston work through Todd McFarlane’s entire Spawn mythology one hellish arc at a time. Pierce has already survived one trip through the Play Comics gauntlet with me on Spawn in the Demon’s Hand, so they know exactly what they signed up for this time: showing up, being extremely knowledgeable, and getting talked into yet another licensed beat-em-up nobody asked for.

So grab a ninja scroll, pick a turtle, any turtle, and let’s find out whether Mutant Nightmare sent Konami’s turtle trilogy out on a high note, or whether the Triceratons should’ve just stayed home.
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In 1986, King Features looked at its stable of unrelated newspaper strip heroes and decided the responsible thing to do was throw them all in a blender. Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, and the Phantom. A spaceman, a stage hypnotist, and a guy who lives in a skull-shaped cave and inherited his job from his dad got drafted into a single Saturday morning cartoon called Defenders of the Earth on the apparent theory that if the Avengers could do a team-up, so could three guys who had never met before that year and shared nothing except a syndicate contract.

Then, because nothing from the ’80s was allowed to stay just a cartoon, Defenders of the Earth became a video game in 1990, courtesy of Enigma Variations, for the exact kind of home computer that made you type a magic incantation and wait: Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga, and, for the three people on Earth who owned one, the SAM Coupé. You play Flash, sneaking through Ming’s castle dodging security cameras, occasionally calling in Mandrake or the Phantom to open doors, because apparently that’s what magic and jungle-honed strength were for in these days.

Helping make sense of this glorious pile of licensed heroes is Ryan Estrada, who’s written comics for Star Trek, Popeye, Garfield, and, fittingly, Flash Gordon itself, having contributed to Papercutz’s newer Flash Gordon Adventures line. Ryan’s also built a reputation for tucking real hidden puzzles and messages directly into his comic pages, in plain sight, daring anyone paying close enough attention to find them. Which feels like exactly the right skillset for an episode about a security system that apparently only a few specific comic strip disciplines can defeat.

So track down a joystick you no longer own, adjust to a universe where Flash Gordon answers to a management structure that includes a professional hypnotist, and let’s find out whether the Defenders of the Earth earned their game, or whether Earth would’ve been just fine handling Ming on its own.
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Garfield has spent I don’t want to think about how long being terrified for our entertainment, and somehow this is only the second time we’ve noticed. Today we’re looking at two occasions Jim Davis’s laziest creation got shoved into a horror plot he absolutely did not sign up for: Garfield’s Nightmare on the Nintendo DS and Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt, the Flash game that lived on Garfield.com back when “Flash game that lived on a dot-com” was still a sentence people said out loud.

Helping us make sense of not one but two instances of “cat, but afraid” is Dee Parson from Supr Dee, the syndicated cartoonist behind Rosebuds. A guy who, by his own account, actually learned to read on Garfield comics, which means this episode is less “guest booking” and more “the student returns to grade the source material’s video game output.”

So lock the pantry, keep an eye on the Scare-O-Meter, and let’s find out if either of these games earned the right to scare a cat who once ate an entire sandwich made of other sandwiches.Continue Reading

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Superman Returns came out in 2006 and asked audiences a very sincere question: what if Superman, but sad? Brandon Routh brooded his way across the big screen, lifting improbable objects and pining for Lois Lane, and somewhere in a boardroom, someone decided this emotionally complex theatrical event needed to be a video game on four different platforms. Five if you count the Game Boy Advance version, which is technically a different game but we’re counting it anyway because we paid good money decided that we just needed to talk about it.

The PS2 and Xbox versions let you fly around Metropolis, absorbing explosions with your face in service of a health bar that belonged to the city rather than Superman himself, which is either a genuinely clever design idea or the most passive-aggressive mechanic in superhero gaming history. The Xbox 360 version turned the whole thing into an open-world showcase for what next-gen hardware could do, which in 2006 meant “look at those buildings.” The DS version was a side-scrolling beat-em-up. The GBA version was something else entirely. Superman Returns contained multitudes, is what we’re saying.

Joining me to dig through the whole sprawling, melancholy, city-defending mess is Adam Williamson, real-life friend, frequent Play Comics guest, and owner of a podcast idea that has been marinating for what I can only describe as a concerning length of time. Adam, I say this with love: at some point you’re going to have to actually make the thing. In the meantime, he’s here, the knowledge is flowing, and we’ve got a Superman game across half a console generation to get through.

So settle in, try not to let the city’s health bar drop to zero, and let’s find out whether Superman Returns deserved better — from Hollywood, from the games industry, and honestly, maybe from all of us.Continue Reading

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Somewhere out there is a piece of Superman history that almost nobody remembers exists. Not because it was bad. Not because it flopped. It just… vanished off the internet one day, like it got caught in a Phantom Zone projector aimed at a server farm. That’s the story of The Multipath Adventures of Superman, and we’re about to dig it back up.

The whole thing started life as a CD project dreamed up with actual comic book writers, including Louise Simonson and Steve Englehart, before publisher Brilliant Digital Entertainment decided the format worked better as an ongoing online series. So you got Menace of Metallo on disc, and then a sprawling, branching, multi-arc saga that lived entirely on the internet, complete with a villain who time-travels just to make everyone’s life harder. And then, because this is the late ’90s internet we’re talking about, the entire thing quietly vanished. No re-releases, no remasters, just a bunch of dead links and a handful of people insisting this was real and they didn’t dream it.

So yes, this episode is a little bit of a cheat. We usually stick to games you could buy off a shelf and put in a console. This is software, distributed on a CD-ROM and later piecemeal over a dial-up connection, that you had to install a special plugin just to run. But it’s a piece of Superman history that’s basically slipped through the cracks of the internet entirely, and that felt worth breaking the rules for.

Helping me dig through the wreckage is Chris Baker from SuperHero.VG, who has spent decades working on actual superhero games at places like Marvel and LucasArts and literally wrote the book on this stuff with WRONG! Retro Games, You Messed Up Our Comic Book Heroes! If anyone can tell us whether this lost relic deserves to stay lost, it’s him.

So load up the B3D Projector, brace for some early-internet voice acting, and let’s see how many ways Metropolis can end before lunch.Continue Reading

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Look, at some point you have to respect the audacity of putting the entire Justice League on a Game Boy Advance cartridge. Not one hero. Not two heroes doing a buddy-cop thing. The whole league. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the works. All crammed onto a handheld that also had to share shelf space with Hamtaro games. That’s ambition. That’s vision. That might also be a cry for help, but we’re not here to judge.

Justice League Chronicles was Ubisoft’s love letter to the animated series, which means it had genuinely great source material to pull from and a screen roughly the size of a Post-it note to work with. The Justice League animated series was the kind of show that made you sit down and watch it with your kids because it was actually that good, and somehow that energy had to survive the trip to a device that ran on two AA batteries.

Here to help make sense of it all is Doug Adamson from The Monitor Tapes, a man whose podcast is literally named after the thing the Justice League uses to watch for trouble. Which means he was cosmically destined to appear on this episode whether he wanted to or not.

So pull up a chair in the Watchtower, try not to touch anything that looks important, and let’s talk about a DC animated tie-in that had no business being as earnest as it was.
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The year was 2006. The Game Boy Advance was winding down, the Justice League animated series had wrapped up, and someone at WayForward Technologies looked at a tiny handheld screen and said, “You know what this needs? The Flash. Running very fast. On a cartridge the size of a business card.” And honestly? Bold decision.

Justice League Heroes: The Flash took the Game Boy Advance, the beloved animated series, and a Justice League comic run and asked the eternal question: how many Rogues can you stuff into a handheld beat-em-up before the whole thing starts wobbling? This episode, we’re finding out. We’re covering the comics, the game, the cartoon connections, and whether Barry Allen or Wally West gets more respect in a world that keeps giving them both the speed force and zero chill.

Joining us to run this whole thing down is Marrilee O’Neil from Fear Coded, who brings exactly the right energy for a conversation about a game that moves fast and expects you to keep up.

So strap in, try not to blink, and let’s do this before the Flash gets impatient and reruns the episode himself.Continue Reading