Alex, Tom S and Graham push right in the wordless storyworld of Voyage, bash chitin in the bullet hell of Mushihimesama and gush over affectionate genre-hopping satire Lair of the Clockwork God. If you feel you’ve been harmed by the discussion of pizza in this podcast, please contact our Culinary Crime Office on 1800-DONT-AT-ME. Anthem, the deadest living game, has now become simply dead instead . Old School Runescape’s on Steam now . Diablo II: Resurrected is a fancy remaster . Look out for wha...
Feb 26, 2021•1 hr 45 min
Both Toms, Graham and Marsh defy death in timeloop horror House, deal death in globetrotting trilogy Hitman, dodge death in smart shmup Bezier and become death in Death Crown. Also: streamlined space strat Slipways and the joy of City Guesser. It’s reverse-Hitman: House . Reverse-reverse-Hitman: 360 Hitman / Hitman III / Hitman 8 / World of Assassination Trilogy – Part 3: The Third . Brilliant shmup, now a lovely “bath game” for Switch, Bezier . Pared-down 1-bit horror tower defence/offence game...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr 31 min
Chris, Alex and Marsh boot up modern games made for ye olde machines (Micro Mages, Nox Archaist and Tanglewood), put the boot into baddies in Shady Knight, woodchip birdies in Journey to the Savage Planet and chop wood in Nordic survival hit Valheim. Marty O’Donnell primes his Plangent Hero Horn for the return of Six Days in Fallujah . Alex just can’t stop playing with his MiSTer . Micro Mages , a cute 40kb platformer for the NES (that you can buy on Steam and play in Windows). Nox Archaist , an...
Feb 12, 2021•1 hr 46 min
Graham, Tom S, Alex and Chris numb themselves with Hexceed and Dungeon & Puzzles; inexplicably return to Syberia; defy the predictions of Gods Will Fall; hop, skip and jump through Olija; and holiday in Hitman III. Stadia shutters its game-making efforts . “Google was a terrible place to make games. Imagine Amazon, but under-resourced.” Oof. A Mass Effect trilogy remaster is on its way. Behold the Four Lads of Total War: Warhammer III . The comparative aching lameness of Dark Alliance’s Go P...
Feb 05, 2021•1 hr 46 min
Tom S, Chris and Marsh sink into the obliviating waters of Hades and World of Warcraft, gun gribblies in Soulsian sleeper hit Remnant: From the Ashes, blindly steer a nation in Suzerain and snap critters in Penko Park’s kooky safari. Fire-extinguisher-head-bonk-sim, Hitman 3 is out! Disney’s Lucasgames’ Arts Films Games: there’s a Ubisoft Star War acomin’ ! And MachineGames are having a crack at Indiana Jones. World of Warcraft : a box of grey, salty meat pucks sauced with a squirt of the Franci...
Jan 22, 2021
Toms F and S are joined by Alex to discuss Monster Train’s forthcoming factions, go full dork over emulation widget MiSTer and be disappointed by England – in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, too! Ha! Ha! Ha! Cyberpunk 2077’s developers have conceded the existence of linear time, but not much else, in their roadmap . Ogle Dead End Thrills ‘ screenshots of cyberladies. I mean, cor . Monster Train had a free public test weekend for its upcoming DLC, The Last Divinity. It’s over now, though, soz. The bes...
Jan 15, 2021•1 hr 50 min
Bonus episode! Tom chats to top games critic and lovely person Christian Donlan in a meandering discussion about Star Trek, old Mario games, classic sci-fi films, Rogue, and much more. And then Christian’s cat makes an appearance, which just makes everything even better. The main C&C pod shall resume service shortly! Also another film ‘n telly pod with Jamie Brittain is in the works. Also I, Tom, having dropped the third-person pretence only moments into writing this intro, will politely nag...
Jan 12, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Tom and Jamie gathered many weeks ago to record a whole new meandering chat through our film and TV obsessions of the moment! With Christmas just around the corner, Tom has finally found the time to publish this one as a hopefully fun bonus episode for the holiday season. 2020 is ending; hooray! We hope you all get to enjoy some quality films and telly with a beverage of your choice over the break. Many thanks to Jamie for the following in-depth show notes. You can find the pod on the Crate and ...
Dec 23, 2020•1 hr 49 min
Graham, Tom S, Chris, Tom F, Alex and Marsh pile into the electronic telephone booth for our Game of the Year episode. Many things are discussed, some of which are even games that came out this year. Here’s the whole lot of them. Don’t read ahead if you want to rubberneck at the beautiful carnage of Chris’s protracted segue car-crash, the true game of 2020. Teardown Hunt: Showdown Monster Train Death Stranding Wide Ocean Big Jacket Destiny 2 Gears Tactics Paradise Killer World of Horror The Last...
Dec 19, 2020•2 hr 7 min
Chris, Tom S and Marsh dial in to the eZone to digichat about obvious replicant Geoff Keighley’s latest data-dump, before opening up our brainchips to irrecoverable corruption by the Cyberpunk 2077 discourse. Suffer the many newses beamed from Geoff Keighley’s Laser Cage . Bioware had trailers for new Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects, both offering a homeopathic density of information – though little does this impede our speculation! Disco Elysium is getting full voice-acting : which will be ...
Dec 14, 2020•2 hr 6 min
Chris, Alex and Marsh arrive belatedly at the zeitgeist of September 2018 with a helluva yikes. Like gazpacho soup, enjoy these takes cold: World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Fortnite done some big numbers . But are they that big? Yes, but imagine the concurrents if you had to feed buses of children into the slavering maw of Dot Cotton. Mask of the Rose is the new game from Failbetter, the devs behind Fallen London. It’s a visual novel romance set in the same si...
Dec 04, 2020•1 hr 32 min
Chris, Graham and Alex heed the wisdom of the Time-ramisu and peer into the future of mecha strategy game Phantom Brigade, the alternative past of tactics game Möbius Front ’83, and an eternity of Destiny 2. The Golden Joysticks happened again and proved to be an exacting measure of how people who voted in this thing voted. Only a dad could forgive horizontal Iron Man but, alas, he doesn’t have time to play that Avengers game. Squeenix are switching to work-from-home indefinitely. Loosey-goosey ...
Nov 27, 2020•2 hr 10 min
Graham, Tom S and Marsh gather to caress eagles in pretty action adventure The Pathless, and return to 9th century England to malign herons in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. IO Interactive are making a Bond game! Appreciate the pandering of The Pathless . It’s a bit like Journey and Shadow of the Colossus . Admire the shining spires of Orpington (maybe) in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla . Chill out to the stress of Super Hexagon . Shoot weak points as gruesome therapy in Killer7 . Spin plates (with an ...
Nov 20, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Alex and Marsh chat to Joannes Truyens, writer-designer of Neurocracy – a game about near-future conspiracies, pandemics, surveillance, cybernetics and tuna – that you unravel by exploring a fictional Wikipedia. You can play the demo of Neurocracy right now . Follow Joannes and the project itself on Twitter and watch out for a release of Neurocracy in spring next year! You can listen to this interview on YouTube , and subscribe to our YouTube channel , if you like. The Crate and Crowbar is kindl...
Nov 17, 2020•47 min
All the Toms join Marsh to be obliterated by the pitiless ocean, leaving only a flotsam of Elcor facts as a sign of their passing. Also discussed: Watch Dogs’ cockerney spider bots and the fine flails of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Codies got bought by TakeTwo for approximately 10 times as much as we would have guessed they were worth. DoNotEat did a good video about why Elon Musk’s Loop concept is a bucket of cold piss. Bioware are remastering the Masses Effect and are making another one . The ...
Nov 13, 2020•1 hr 52 min
Graham, Alex, Tom F and Marsh turn up the Plancks to Max in the highly-destructible thievery sandbox Teardown, avoid bisection in the deadly arenas of Disc Room and bring birds to political ruin in woodland strategy game Root. Kill your solution-carcasses in the very defenestrationy blast-your-own-escape-route thievery sandbox Teardown . Graham’s review of the same. The ingenious Teardown car-theft solution that Graham references. Watch your fingers in pure peril-avoidance game Disc Room . Shank...
Nov 06, 2020•1 hr 35 min
Chris and Marsh climb atop one another, together forming the shape of a much larger podcasting lobster, to discuss social spook surveyor game Phasmophobia, probe the pachinko-like possibilities of roguelike Ring of Pain and return to the Warzone. Lot of news this week. More puking than normal too. COINCIDENCE? Oculus requires a Facebook account and if you delete your Facebook account it deletes your games. BLAAAARP. Facebook streaming is – for now – mostly about F2P games for yer da. BLAAAARP. J...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 32 min
Graham, Alex and Marsh waggle wands in alchemical roguelike Noita, boggle minds in fractal-palace puzzler Manifold Garden, solve crimes in tech-occult mystery Lucifer Within Us and probe private parts in nosy ghost adventure I Am Dead. Cool Congresswoman AOC’s Twitch-topping stream. PC Gamer’s article on the mainstreaming and word-of-mouthing of PC gaming. Stream-beloved backstabber, Among Us . Collaboratively developed fantasy baseball game: Blaseball Cave-diving witch-based roguelike Noita . F...
Oct 23, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Alex and Tom F relive the fragtastic heyday of the FPS with Quake mod Arcane Dimensions, and die, with varying degrees of annoyance, at the hands of three different roguelikes: Noita, Spelunky 2 and Hades. Voxel-physics-destruction game Teardown is out on the 29th of October! The torrid Golden Axed tale. Gwen Frey ‘s Lab Rat is looking for lab rats, er, playtesters. Link on the Steam page. Jakub Wasilewski’s SlipWays made in/for PICO-8 . A full-fat PC version is on its way! Awesome Quake mod and...
Oct 16, 2020•1 hr 56 min
Graham, Tom S and Chris launch a lifetime of fandom directly at the modest target area of Star Wars: Squadrons, setting off a chain reaction of space-spooge. Also: Zelda meets gacha in Genshin Impact. Baldur’s Gate 3 has entered early access. It’s quite crashy at the moment, but you can befriend a walking brain. You’ll know in your heart whether to install it now or wait a year. Steam’s Autumn Festival has ripened and tumbled from the tree. Will it be a mighty payload of fructose or dispense a m...
Oct 09, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Tom S, Chris and Marsh vibrate with the excitement of an imminent Star Wars game release while trying to talk about Necromunda: Underhive Wars, budget co-op spookathon Phasmophobia and impressively reprehensible VR stabber Blade And Sorcery. Listen to Tom Senior’s excellent TV and film spin-off podcast with Jamie Brittain , professional smart telly-man: Monday Or Soon They put Minecraft in Smash . Just think of the Skype calls. Chris and Tom can barely contain their excitement at becoming a zoom...
Oct 02, 2020•1 hr 28 min
Welcome to a new experiment from the Crate and Crowbar! We love games, but we’re also huge fans of films and television, especially in these Covid times, so we decided to start a podcast about all that. Tom Senior joins TV writer Jamie Brittain for a whiplash tour of the shows we’re watching right now. In spite of everything going on in the world, TV is amazing at the moment, and deserves to be celebrated. As this continues we’re planning to touch on every genre and mode of TV we can find, from ...
Sep 26, 2020•1 hr 33 min
Graham, Tom F and Marsh debate the merits of moon moles in Spelunky 2. That’s it. That’s the only game we need this week. But also: Bethesda’s acquisition, our favourite videogame banks, and multiplayer that isn’t multiplayer. Bethesda’s acquisition by the Big Green Giant. Spelunky 2 . Welcome to the only show note you’ll need for the next 50 pods. A collaborative rather than multiplayer game? House Flipper . Control a collaborative cat as the second player in Spiritfarer . Group sleuthing is po...
Sep 25, 2020•1 hr 14 min
Alex, Tom F and Marsh island-hop in peerless push-block puzzler A Monster’s Expedition, island-cop in murder mystery Paradise Killer, and Ireland-top in medieval wife-finding interface, Crusader Kings III. Plus! Hadean Lands and Defense of the Oasis. Enjoy the agony of U-turning marketing executives as a result of the Sony’s PS5 showcase . Is this the best Sokoban ever? A Monster’s Expedition (Through Puzzling Exhibitions) . “Now you’re thinking with logs.” Footcare is surprisingly important ami...
Sep 18, 2020•1 hr 41 min
Graham, Tom S and Chris pick apart the latest Ubisoft Forward like carrion on road-kill, before swooping on, beaks bloodied, to devour Mafia: Definitive Edition, Marvel’s Avengers and Mortal Shell. Mmm-mm! Ubisoft Forward’s livestream and Yves Guillemot’s apology . Geoff Keighley was not impressed . For the love of God, Ubisoft, DO NOT BAIT HIS DISPLEASURE! Has not 2020 already demonstrated the devastating power of his wrath? Revel in the strong Pip energy of A Monster’s Expedition – it’s out! M...
Sep 11, 2020•1 hr 55 min
Tom F, Chris and Marsh offer late takes on the quickly cooling Gamescom starch bomb, ferry frogs to the great beyond in Spiritfarer and nitpick the nitpicking, and other ape antics, in epic evolution yarn, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Gamescom was put in the microwave for 6 minutes and served without butter. Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad is half a potato , stamping on a human face, forever. Vlambeer is no more! :'( But as it expires it has released a final prototype . :’D Usher your frog uncle t...
Sep 04, 2020•1 hr 37 min
Chris, Tom F and Marsh ogle the inter-corporate fisticuffs of Epic v Apple, boggle at the buffs of roguelike shooter Risk of Rain 2, make bassist assumptions in identity puzzler Family and fear ducks in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s Tim vs Tim! Chris Plante has a good summary and analysis of the Epic/Apple lawsuit in his newsletter . Dim Tanglell? Who he? We will never know or care again, hopefully. Wash that Assburger down with a slug of Clancian Ribena in Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War ...
Aug 21, 2020•1 hr 51 min
Alex, Chris and Marsh dispute the tutes of Horizon: Zero Dawn, unpack throwback hack-n-slash Book of Demons, wibble beans in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout and quibble shtick in meta point-n-click There Is No Game, before returning to our briny home. Pony Island and Hex are the Daniel Mullins Games games which precede the recently unveiled Inscryption . Looks great. No idea what it is really. Pony Canyon appears to be a Japanese publisher of music, games and anime. It is not the thing we talk abou...
Aug 14, 2020•2 hr 2 min
Tom F, Alex and Marsh gather to discuss Obsidian’s backyard survival game Grounded, go postal, in a very tranquil way, in Thousand Threads, sink into a fug of nostalgia for Halo 3, toot flutes and avoid parps in Ghosts of Tsushima and briefly descend into Hades. Dana Schwartz’s tweet about Reddit user NoNoNo_OhOhOh’s post about John Boyne’s novel’s deseparate SEO Zelda calamity. Enjoy, or decry, miniature multiplayer makework in survival game Grounded . “Just get yourself a small metal spoon, si...
Aug 07, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Tom S, Graham and Marsh congeal into a mass of gnashing mouths to chew over indie creature feature Carrion, disrespect the lore in Star Wars: Battlefront II and smash many glass men in the expandalone Superhot: Mind Control Delete. We talk about the Xbox Showcase. You can watch the full stream here , and, because I am very lazy, here is Rock Paper Shotgun’s nicely curated list of all the games revealed therein, some of which we talk about. The recording mangled the bit where I say the nickname o...
Jul 31, 2020•1 hr 30 min
