Last week saw the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a movie reputedly so terrible that it's actually scoring well below some versions of its terrible tie-in game on Metacritic. Or wait — it turns out that's actually par for the course with a lot of superhero movies and their associated games, seemingly regardless of their respective quality. We take a look at the biggest disparities in this week's Top 5, then follow it up with some entertaining sound clips starring Kevin Spacey, and your favorite games-within-games.

What do games really think of their audiences? If their portrayals of gamers are any indication, the sentiment is somewhere between contempt, pity, and outright affection. This week's show takes a look at five standout examples before moving on to a scattershot discussion of new releases, not enough talk about the E.T. landfill excavation, and your favorite gaming trios.

This week, the subdued trio of Mikel, Anne, and Dave lead an exploration into the deeper mysteries of games that use nonsensical babbling instead of voice-acting, after which we stumble through a meager field of new releases, a few news tidbits, and a look at the real-world facts you've learned from your years of playing games.

Too many HD "remakes" these days are content to slap on some sharp new textures and call it a day. Most don't want to risk the ire of gamers by actually overhauling gameplay or design that worked 20 years ago, but a notable few have braved those waters and actually come out better for it. We celebrate them in this week's Top 5, then move on to talk about Trials Fusion, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and what your favorite Internet pranks were from this year's April Fool's Day.

By listener request (and in lieu of any better ideas), this week's Top 5 is dedicated gaming's greatest graffiti artists (or possibly just graffiti-themed games; we seem a little fuzzy on the concept). There's also lots of talk about Amazon officially getting into the console business, along with some idle conjecture about Titanfall on 360 and your ideas for mundane-activity simulators.

Last week's trailer for the Michael Bay Ninja Turtles movie was an inspiration — specifically, an inspiration for a Top 5 about the worst TMNT games of all time. With that out of the way, we talk about Goat Simulator, California State Senator Leland Yee allegedly becoming a real-life GTA character, and your ideas for games that would be better with virtual reality.

After decades spent on the technological trash heap, virtual reality's had a huge resurgence in the past week. Sony unveiled Morpheus, Oculus Rift rolled out its Crystal Cove prototype, and Microsoft revealed it was working on its own headset — and that was all before Facebook bought Oculus (which happened after we recorded this week's episode). It was a no-brainer, then, to start off VGA 57 with a rundown of our top 5 favorite/catastrophically failed headsets, after which we talk about Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, Infamous: Second Mark Ecko's Getting Up, and what you'd do if you were given free rein to mess up a game's established canon.

Inspired by the console-specific weirdness in this week's release of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Episode 56 rolls up with a Top 5 about DLC expansions that threw canon to the wind. Then we continue with some talk about the mildly disappointing Ground Zeroes (which looks like a goddamn 11 out of 10 next to the crass letdown of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z), and take a look at some of your favorite mechs.

Now that Titanfall is presumably eating up everyone's time on PC and Xbox One, we kick off our fifty-fifth show with what may be our shortest Top 5 yet, about the weirdest mechs we could think of. There's also some talk about Dark Souls II and (naturally) Titanfall, some getting grossed out at Chris' obscene texting (and also at the Shaq-Fu sequel), and then a look at what you'd do if you could turn any TV show into a game.

In case the title didn't give it away, this week we honor the arrival of South Park: The Stick of Truth with a Top 5 about other games based on basic-cable TV shows, and somehow manage to mess even that up by including a network show! Can you imagine? Also, Anne busts out another "guess the game by its Steam reviews" game, and we give a listen to some of your favorite victory sounds.

The last week of February boasts some notably dark-looking new releases, so we thought we'd add a little color with our five favorite games about bringing dead worlds back to life. Then we unwisely gush about Thief and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 just days before finding out everyone else hated them, chat about some troubling developments in last week's news cycle, and talk about your biggest crushes on game characters.

VGA takes another quick trip back to the criminality well this week, with a look at five  "heroes" who did hard time and became our favorite video-game convicts. Then we dive right into Earth Defense Force 2025 and Strider, talk about our experiences in the Elder Scrolls Online and Titanfall betas, and run through some of your suggestions for game-inspired Olympic events.

As athletes compete and hotel rooms disintegrate at the Sochi Olympics, we follow a listener suggestion and take a look back at some of our favorite games about The Games — with the caveat that few of them were ever any good, and we've barely played any of them, if at all. (It's probably funnier that way.) Then there's some brief talk about Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, a quick overview of the D.I.C.E. awards, and a long, self-indulgent look at your favorite moments from our first 50 episodes.

Between last week's Sly Cooper movie reveal and the incoming release of Thief, February is shaping up to be a very burgle-y month. So let's kick it off with a celebration of our favorite master thieves, then get giddy about Jazzpunk, Octodad, and Dustforce before talking about your favorite sports games of all time. Oh! And it's also our 50th anniversary, so expect a few tiny surprises, including a news "theme" for which your ears will never forgive us.

With Oscar season finally upon us, there's no better time to (once again) use Hollywood's long history with gaming as a creative crutch. This time, we take a look at games positioned as legitimate sequels to movies (whether by design, or simply by dint of being the closest thing we're likely to get) before talking about Broken Age, Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, and Candy Banner: The Crush Saga. We also try to guess games by their user reviews, and then take a look at what you'd do if you could turn this year's Oscar-nominated films into games.

Apropos of nothing, we start off this week's show with a Top 5 about heroes who have, at best, a tenuous grip on their heads. Then there's some talk about Broken Age, Banner Saga, and a smattering of last week's news, followed by some startling revelations about your favorite ability-granting costumes.

The VGA crew limps through another slow January release week the only way we know how: with lots of tangential nonsense. There's also a Top 5 about costume changes as a major gameplay mechanic, some chat about CES 2014 and PlayStation Now, a bold plan to Kickstart and revive the Official Dreamcast Magazine, and a quick look at your most-anticipated games of 2014.

Aaaand we're back! VGA returns from its two-week hiatus with an obligatory Top 5 about our most hotly anticipated games. Then we get cheery on bumwine and talk about the booze- and game-related shenanigans we got up to while we't making podcasts, after which we run through your personal picks for Game of the Year 2013.

This year isn't quite finished, but Vidjagame Apocalypse is until January 7, so here's an extra-long countdown of the VGA regulars' 10 favorite games of 2013! After that, we touch on the meager crop of year-end new releases and discuss your picks for the worst game of the year (oh, and apologies in advance for the ear-splitting raccoon chorus. No, we've never heard of Autotune).

As the wheezing beast that is 2013 enters its final weeks of life, we've come roaring back from hiatus with our Top 5 protagonists who went villain for the sequel, a little bit of talk about new releases (including the somewhat surprising Gran Turismo 6), and a very special musical performance by The Raccoon that he swore to kill us over if we ever let it see the light of day. Then we talk about what you were planning to play over Thanksgiving (or comparable holiday), sure.

Has it really been 125 years already? Another Thanksgivukkah is nearly upon us, once again merging Thanksgiving with the first night of Hanukkah in an explosion of festive confusion! This week, we spend plenty of time talking about the Xbox One launch (as well as your favorite launch games of all time), but not before discussing our five favorite turkeys in gaming and performing the most amateurish Thanksgivukkah skit we could slap together at the last minute.

We're stuck between launches as of this writing, with the PS4 (theoretically) in stores and the Xbox One poised to give us a slightly different version of the events of last Friday. What an exciting time to be alive, and what a perfect time to tick off the five best console launch games ever! (OK, seven. We  cheated on the last one.) In the second segment, we talk about our experiences with the new systems and their launch games, after which we go over your picks for the game that defined the last generation.

In just a few days as of this posting, the PlayStation 4 will be a thing you can buy, bringing about the first major generational shift for consoles since the release of the Xbox 360 eight years ago. With "next-gen" about to become "current-gen," and "current-gen" poised to become another fond memory for gamers to get nostalgic about in a decade or so, we've dedicated the first half of this show to five games that may not have been the best or even most important, but that -- for better or worse -- defined the 360/PS3/Wii generation. And, sure, there's also some talk about the PS4's launch library, Call of Duty: Ghosts resolutions, and whether any of you are buying Activision's flagship shooter this year.

This week is Call of Duty week, with CoD: Ghosts hitting store shelves ahead of its next-gen launches, but let's ignore that for the first half of the show. Instead, we'll talk about our favorite heroes over 40, then chat with Bob "bobservo" Mackey of Retronauts fame about Typing of the Dead: Overkill, and discuss what you all did for Halloween.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is out today, and to mark the occasion, we sit down with a SPECIAL GUEST STAR: Gabe Graziani, senior community developer at Ubisoft and the official face of Assassin's Creed fandom! But first, Halloween is this week, so let's celebrate by talking about playable werewolves, after which we'll get to some of your creepiest experiences playing games.

Remember way back when game publishers weren't interested in locking down their intellectual property, and would hand the franchise keys to any porting house that had two ZX Spectrums to rub together? No? Well, this week's Top 5 does, as we take a look at some of the not-quite-official sequels that were part of gaming's early years. There's also a little chat about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Dual Destinies, as well as some vague disappointment about Watch_Dogs being delayed and the resultant lack of enthusiasm in this fall's next-gen launch lineups — and then we talk about what you'd slap Tom Clancy's name on AND your favorite cover Pokemon.

This week, Mikel and the rest of the regular VGA crew take a breather, giving special guests Henry Gilbert, Carolyn Gudmundson and Brett Elston exactly the opening they need to stage an impromptu reunion of their old Pokemon Monday podcast and chat at length about Pokemon X/Y, before turning the conversation to the very important matter of Pokemon in general.

If you're not a Pokémon fan, the biggest release this week is Beyond: Two Souls, the latest beautiful, divisive, interactive game-like thing from developer Quantic Dream and its cackling French overlord, David Cage. In honor of its arrival (and to balance out all the swipes we've taken at Heavy Rain over the years), we lavish a little praise on our favorite moments in David Cage's creations, shed a tear over Tom Clancy's passing, and talk about some of the things you wanted to do in Grand Theft Auto Online before the servers were working properly.

This week, we decided to take a look at some of our favorite, sadly misguided one-off consoles, created mainly by companies who'd dipped their toes into video games once or twice and suddenly thought they could be the next Nintendo. Then there's a whole bunch of talk about Steam OS (or possibly a Greek guy named Steamos), a general loss of cohesion, and a look at your most memorable experiences standing in launch lines.

Grand Theft Auto has finally become so ingrained in mainstream culture that not only did GTA V break all sales records for all media ever (probably), but it took a torture scene to raise any real controversy this time around. So naturally, we've jumped on the lurid bandwagon with our top 5 disturbingly interactive torture scenes, more GTA chatter, a po-faced discussion about sexism in games by four straight white males, and your favorite GTA or GTA-alike missions.

It's all about one specific big release this week, as we begin with a celebration of GTA clones and then dive into a lengthy discussion about Grand Theft Auto V. We also talk about your favorite game tie-ins, and Tyler never gets around to talking for an hour about Papers, Please, which is only a little bit disappointing.

No Top 5 this week — just lots and lots of talk about the cool stuff we saw at PAX Prime. (Big thanks to everyone who came to our meetup at GameWorks!) We also chat about Killzone: Mercenary, Arma III and Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5, take a long look at Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, and find out which single question you'd ask your favorite video game characters.

Everyone's back from another successful PAX, and yet this week's episode was recorded just before PAX. It's not outdated — it's a time capsule! A time capsule that focuses on five games disavowed by their own creators (or the creators of whatever franchise spawned them), as well as a little Rayman and a little Killer Is Dead, plus your favorite indie games of 2013.

Not a whole lot's happening during the gap between Gamescom and PAX, and yet we somehow found a way to fill more than 100 minutes with chatter about great actors who slummed it in games, next-gen console release dates, and your most favoritest weapons of 2013.

For no other reason than that a listener suggested it, we spend a fat chunk of this week's episode dissecting five games that changed radically during development, often into (or away from) something that completely defied our expectations — and, in a few cases, changed the course of gaming history. (Thanks, Odie Esty!) Since this is also the biggest week for retail game releases in a while, there's quite a bit of talk about Saints Row IV, Splinter Cell and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (among others), along with a look at your favorite indie/smaller-budget/download-only games.

You can never have too many musical episodes, right? This week, we give a listen to five bands that exist only in their respective games (counting down our favorites as we go). There's also some talk about Luigis and clown heists, a little bit of fawning over just-released indie game Papers, Please, and a look at the games people nagged you to play so much, you didn't want to play them anymore. (WARNING: We may nag you about these.)

With the release of Pikmin 3 this week, it's high time we paid tribute to the great unsung heroes of gaming: disposable minions. Specifically your disposable minions. We also have a lively discussion about Dragon's Crown's extreme stylization, chat a bit about Phil Fish and online abuse, and explore your ideas for kaiju games.

Giant city-crushin' monsters are in right now, so why not devote a show to their greatest appearances in video games (and give kaiju expert Brett Elston a chance to wax nostalgic at the same time)? There's also some talk of mysterious new PC releases, e-cigarettes for some reason, and a quick look at your favorite games of the year so far.

Have we really been doing this for 25 straight weeks? Dang. To celebrate being halfway to 50, we spend this episode counting down our top 5 games of 2013 (so far), gushing about Earthbound, recounting your most memorable game deals, and introducing a NEW COMMUNITY SEGMENT (OK we admit it it's just a twitter contest).

This week, we pay our respects to five hotly anticipated games that were shut down before  ever really seeing the light of day. We also chat about a little iOS oddity called Deus Ex: The Fall (and other new releases, sure), freak out over the revelation that Microsoft's been handing user data over to the NSA, and talk about which times and settings you'd love to explore in an open-world game.

Ride to Hell: Retribution is already being hailed by critics as the worst game of 2013, which has been enough to get most outlets to forget about it. Most outlets, however, are not run by masochists for whom the phrase "worst game" is a kind of catnip, so we used it as a jumping-off point for a Top 5 about biker gangs. We also talk about The Walking Dead: 400 Days and some of the worst things you've ever done in a game. (Turns out some of you are real sadists, so this was a treat.)

Last week was a pretty important one for our LGBT friends; not only was it Pride Week, but the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, clearing the way for gay marriages to be recognized on a federal level. What better way to say "congratulations!" than with a countdown of our favorite trailblazing gay characters from games? (If Pride isn't your thing, you may want to cover your ears for this one.)

This week's Vidjagame Apocalypse starts out innocuously enough, with a look at movies based on fake games, but things get heated in the second half, when the crew debates the merits of Microsoft's decision to roll back its digital rights management plans for the Xbox One. Oh, and in between there's some talk about Deadpool, Project X Zone and other games that actually exist for consoles that are currently available.

In this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we start up a suicide prevention hotline. JUST KIDDING. We talk about making people kill themselves in videogames. Good times. We also talk about Remember Me and your reactions to the Xbone.

In this week's episode we talk about our favorite canine friends and the Xbox One reveal. It's basically just four people talking about dogs for two hours.

In this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we talk about memorable appearances in shitty videogame movies and make speculations about the next Xbox. Yes, we realize the reveal has already happened but when we recorded this, it hadn't.

On this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we talk about our favorite barren, mutant-infested wastelands. There's also a little more singing. Apparently we didn't get enough last week.

Things get musical on this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse. That's not a joke. There's a LOT of singing in this one and we're not even drunk. Well, not all the way drunk. Maybe a little drunk.

In this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we talk about shitty games we love. These games are simultaneously painful and so much fun.

This week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse is hungry for brains. We talk about zombies, the things hurting the games industry and we delve into the forums.

This week's episode is all about SUPERHEROS. Our Top 5 is all about superheros. Our new releases section is all about superheros (well, mostly). Our news is all about superheros (okay definitely not all but we still talk about them).

In this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we talk Lara Croft wannabes and some sad news. We're also doing a giveaway! Yay!

On this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we revisit some of our favorite anxiety-inducing music from games and talk about beloved games from our youth.

Sorry this episode is a little late. We ran into a minor technical difficulty. It's here now and we may all rejoice! Heads up kids, Chris is on this episode which means we'll be talking about a certain duck-centric game for quite a while.

We get a little silly in this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse and talk about BIOSHOCK INFINITE OMG.

Episode 8 of Vidjagame Apocalypse is all about our favorite alcoholics with a very healthy helping of BioShock Infinite talk. Don't worry, we don't get spoilery. Also, we highly recommend NEVER drinking Four Loco. It's awful and makes us all want to cry.

We are all about bro-love in this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse.

For reals, this episode is about bromance, yo. We discuss our favorite bros with bro-nefits, make waaaaaay too many bro puns and really lose our shit near the end. Seriously... We have no idea what happened. About 20 minutes from the end of the episode all the puns start messing with our heads.

This week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse is all about one game in a failing series that raised the franchise from perdition to stand tall once more.

On this week's episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse we find ourselves lost on the high seas of tangents. We swear this episode was supposed to be all about pirates.

With the Oscars recently done away with, we present a special Top 5 (er, Only 5?) along with some new release talk, PS4 news and a quickie debate.

We discuss our favorite narrators, recent releases and Sony rumors. Heads up, folks. This is a long one.

We talk sports, torture, teen wolves, and torture. All the good things in life...

The first episode of Vidjagame Apocalypse has arrived to make the Laser Time family a little more complete. Our debut features potty talk, sexy violence and severed torsos. What more could you really ask for? Host Mikel Reparaz is joined by co-host Anne Lewis and super special guests Chris Antista and Tyler Wilde. This is not your parents' gaming podcast (if it is you have the coolest parents ever).