Ever since Iā€™ve been into speedrunning GrandPOObear has been one of the most exciting runners to watch. His ability at speedrunning Mario is legend and that sportsmanship landed him a recent sponsorship by Red Bull seeing him join a roster of incredible athletes. GrandPOObear is also one of the runners in the Games Done Quick charity speedrun, which is the premier speedrunning community event that now happens three times a year. Recently GrandPOObear announced Speedrun Sessions which is a unique event coming to Portland April 4th at Ground Kontrol. Along with GrandPOObear the other runners at the event are Oatsngoats speedrunning Super Metroid and Andy speedrunning... Read All


Itā€™s a pretty special time when a new Nintendo games comes out and Brad Smith has something with his latest entry to the NES lineup with Lizard. After reading about the game, playing the demo and quite enjoying my time with it I decided to reach out to him and ask him a few questions about the game and his process of creating it.

ā€œChoose your lizard carefully. You can find six different ones scattered across the land, each with its own special ability.

You'll need these abilities as you make your difficult journey through many dangerous places. Carefully hop your way to the top of an active volcano. Surf down a surging river. Swim an underwater lake. Ascend a snowy... Read All


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To help celebrate this weekendā€™s Portland Retro Game Expo I absolutely had to run an interview with Wick, the creator of the upcoming Indie mega hit Crescent Loom. Wick is also the creator of Starship Rubicon, a game we published a time ago and he is also fortunate enough to be boothing with us at this years Retro Expo! If you are visiting the con and heard about Cheerful Ghost or Crescent Loom and are checking us out for the first time then Hello! If you are a long time reader then welcome back! I urge everyone to checkout the interview below and ALSO to head over and try the web version of Crescent Loom at the URL below. You know, for science.

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Douglas Welcome and I are friends from way back in the 90ā€™s(if you can image that far back). Our friendship shared a mutual affinity for music and various geekery so when I saw a recent post of his about his project the RetroProjecto I reached out to him to talk about it. The RetroProject is a retrofitted 16mm Craig film editor with a Raspberry Pi added in it to run retro games.

jdodson: What interested you to getting into hacking the Raspberry Pi?

Douglas Welcome: Honestly it was the price! I have always been tinkering with electronics and was doing a little coding, but when I first started hearing wind of this $35 computer I couldnā€™t help but get one and start... Read All


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To say I am a fan of Kevin Wilsonā€™s work would be an understatement. Kevin not only designed my favorite board game of all time, the original 2004 Doom: the Board Game but he has also created many more incredible games including the upcoming Kickstarter smash hit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past & Mistborn: House War. Iā€™ve done two previous interviews with Kevin one in 2012 and 2013 and realized he was doing so much incredible stuff and way too much time had passed since we last talked.

I want to thank Kevin for taking time out of his schedule to talk with me, because with all his current and upcoming work I am not sure how he has any time for... Read All


One important goal of Beardo Games is to create weird games and there is no better example than the launch of their new game Smooth Operator. Smooth Operator is a couch co-op mobile kissing game where two players both select a character and attempt to follow the on-screen prompts to keep the kissing mojo strong and gain a high score. If you want to score well you will need to work with your partner to execute an array of tongue moves that would make Sharon Stone blush. If this all sounds strange, donā€™t feel bad, the game is but itā€™s also fun and well worth a look.

I first met Beardo Games at a Portland Indie Game Squad event where they had a booth. Smooth Operator is a... Read All


Recently I got together with Wick to do a retrospective interview discussion about Starship Rubicon and get this thoughts on this years launch. We talk about some of his new projects as well as some of his early memories of Star Wars and his start in game development modding Star Wars Battlefront II.

This video is part of a larger holiday video project. I really enjoyed cutting together this video and working more with this documentary interview style. It was also my first use of 4K which seems to have worked out just fine even if most people will ever see it in 1080p. I plan on doing more of these interviews in the Portland game scene so expect to see a few more of... Read All


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In the wake of this years many gaming disappointments, community fiascos and the ever growing disappearance of the sacred dollar menu at restaurants many wonder about the future of gaming and culture. Will the industry see a new wave of games that captivate us in the same way as the ones that came before? Or are we to be held in a creative limbo where everything created is the exact same as the things that came before? In a world of sequels, reboots and DLC packs some developers are taking the gaming basketball down the court and jumping up for a slam dunk. I was able to experience one such effort in developer Travis Newman's brand new game Animator's Nightmare. After... Read All


One of the things I want to spend more time doing is interviewing game developers making great games. Portland has a very active local game scene and I plan on giving it more attention over the upcoming months. Some of my local friends over at Tiny Horse Games are working on a local couch multiplayer platform shooter that is so frantically fun it gives me some of the original Unreal Tournament feels. I reached out to Tyler and Hagen to do an interview with us and after a great PAX showing and a few local cons later they had time in their indie rock development life to talk to us about making games.

jdodson: I want to congratulate you both for the game coming out on... Read All


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Being active in the Portland Indie Game scene is pretty incredible as you get to meet a ton of great people and can see games from an early form to final release. One game you might see shown at any upcoming PDX event is being made by my friends over at SleepNinja Games called Super Splataclysm. Splataclysm is a multiplayer arena that focuses on violent fast paced combat reminiscent of Smash TV or Thunderdome. Even in a very early stage the game is great and watching people enjoy the carnage is quite a bit of fun. A few moons back I asked Justin Baldwin over at SleepNinja games if I could talk to him about the game and how the studio was doing in a post Monsters Ate... Read All