Play Comics

Play Comics is a show that looks at video games based on comic properties and how faithful those games stay to the source material.

Play Comics is a member of the GonnaGeek Podcast Network but is not owned by GonnaGeek.

X-Men Origins Wolverine with Grant Stoye

Read transcript 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…

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Garfield a Tail of Two Kitties with Chris Maynard (Following Films)

Read transcript 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…

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Digimon World 3 with Chels Eichholz (The Q Division, Across the Whoniverse)

Read transcript 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….

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Link to the Past with Josh Garvey

Read transcript 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…

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Hellboy The Science of Evil with George Marston (Spawnography)

Read transcript 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…

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Marvel Trading Card Game with Gen Moonen (“Fun” & Games)

Read transcript >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…

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Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship with William Morgan (The Geek Gauntlet Podcast)

Read transcript 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…

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Garfield and His 9 Lives with Derek B Gayle (Gimmicks, Walloping Websnappers, Lee Carvallo’s Podding Challenge, Skreeonk!, Falling with Style)

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…

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TMNT with Jeremy Powers (Zenspath Entertainment Network)

Read transcript 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…

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Naruto Path of the Ninja with Merrilee O’neil (Fear Coded)

Read transcript 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….

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