PixlBit

Guess we aren't getting that Goncharov game.

Welcome to a really special edition of Nerds Without Pants! We watch The Game Awards together every year, but this year we decided to record ourselves, and it ended up working out as a pretty fun commentary track! Enjoy our live reacts to some big announcements, dunk on fashion, and listen to Justin totally fracture when one of his least favorite games of 2022 wins an award. There are instructions on how to sync up the audio with the video archive in the intro to the show, and we have included a link to the official video archive below. I mean, I guess you could listen to this along with someone else's stream, but that would be kinda weird.

Read more »

Rooting for the little guy.

Willow is a 1988 dark fantasy movie I never watched as a child. Yet the name still rings a nostalgic bell in my brain. Strangely, I didn’t consciously pay it much attention until I stumbled across the NES game sometime in the mid-2000s. But seeing the name and characters on the cover felt deeply familiar in a way I still grapple to understand. Maybe I saw the movie poster and heard its name in passing as a kid but didn’t think much of it until discovering the video game later in life. Initially released by Capcom in 1989, Willow was a calculated attempt to create a game with broader appeal since it was based on a property with characters familiar to its audience. Fortunately for Capcom, those calculations were entirely correct.

Read more »

You're listening to 101.5, The Game, KNWP!

Hey there! This is the craziest Nerds Without Pants EVER! We only got a handful of songs for Stage Select, so instead of talking about 7 or 8 songs and calling it a day we decided to create an entire two hour block of radio programming that approaches UHF levels of insanity. Yep, this is happening. Check it out!

Read more »

A Robot Boy and his Dog

For years, there has been a heated debate among fans of the Mega Man series regarding which one is the best of the original hexalogy. After the facts have been laid out and philosophical life lessons thoroughly dissected, the debate usually boils down to Mega Man 2 vs. Mega Man 3. Which is the greater of the two? Well, no matter which side you’re on, we can all agree on the thing- the cover art for Mega Man 3 finally got it right! No more awkward stances or that pistol-for-an-arm-cannon nonsense. Of course, he didn’t look as good as on the Famicom cover, but that’s another argument.

Read more »

A thunder redux on the Super Nintendo.

Technosoft’s Thunder Force series is rich with 2D shoot-'em-up goodness. After starting with the fifth game in the series on the PlayStation and then working my way back to Thunder Force II on the Genesis some years later, I have become obsessed with everything related to the Thunder Force series since then. One fateful day at a local game store, I stumbled upon Thunder Spirits on the Super NES. "Nah, no way it's related to the Thunder Force series. Probably just a coincidence of naming", I thought to myself. But after doing some additional research, I soon returned to that store and purchased the game. For, you see, this was no coinkydink.

Read more »