TA Playlist Podcast

This month is already in full swing with our community playthrough of Red Dead Redemption. Play along in the TA Playlist Hub as we all saddle up ahead of October's massive sequel with renewed chatter on Rockstar's western.

With our month of Halo: Combat Evolved in full swing over in the TA Playlist Hub, it's time we finally put the bow on last month's game, Fallout: New Vegas. Is New Vegas the best game in the Falloutfranchise? Sam definitely thinks so. Mark tends to agree, though he can't get past some of the legacy problems he's had with the series too. A complex discussion over the endgame decision-making, including a mixed reaction from our community, makes this one especially fun. 

With TA Playlist being well over a year old now, it was about time we all played a game, uh, about time. Our month of Quantum Break coverage is coming to a close but first, we get to wrap it all up with our monthly podcast.

In this episode, Kevin returns and is actually positive on the game, believe it or not. Meanwhile, Sam explains what both this game and Alan Wake do wrong for him, and if you read my review, you already know how I feel about it. All of this plus highlights from our community forums make for another in-depth episode we hope you'll enjoy.

Over the last month we jumped on mushrooms, fought anthropomorphic tea kettles, and sought guidance from a talking cat. No, we weren't tripping out of our minds. We were spending a few weeks in Wonderland. As May has now passed, it's time to say goodbye to Alice: Madness Returns as our featured TA Playlist game.

On this episode, Sam and Mark each have plenty of praise for American McGee's dark vision of the classic story, as did the community for the most part, but none of us are without some criticisms as well, namely for the over-the-top criminal record of the game's central villain. With player feedback, stats, and a deep dive about what the future may hold for McGee's Alice universe, we hope you'll join us down the rabbit hole.

Ahoy! I see a ship! It's close!

We're back with another episode of the TA Playlist Podcast. This is our first show of the second season and in it, we set sail for our newest game to date in Rare's polarizing pirate adventure, Sea of Thieves. Sam and Mark are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their feelings toward the game thanks, in part, to surprisingly different experiences. Meanwhile, our special guest Darren Gargette of the Cane and Rinse podcast seems to fall somewhere in between even as he remains a dedicated daily plunderer. Along with your community feedback, stats, and a few well-placed sea shanties, this makes for the longest episode of the podcast to date. Find your sea legs, fill a barrel of grog, and climb aboard. It's a pirate's life for thee!

If you'd like to hear more from Darren Gargette, he's @dezm0nd on Twitter and he's a veteran contributor to the Cane & Rinse podcast, which you can find at caneandrinse.com. If you want more chat about Rare's glory days, Darren is chairing a Rare Panel featuring Kevin Bayliss, David Wise, Chris Seavor and more at Revival Generation X, that's happening on Saturday the 19th of May and should be available as a podcast soon after. You can find out more @revivalrevents on Twitter

It is now officially podcast time! Welcome to the latest episode of the TA Playlist Podcast. In this episode, Mark calls Fable II charming roughly 104 times while Sam admits his role as a scheming landlord all in the name of Gamerscore. All of that, plus what may have been the most community correspondence we've ever squeezed into an episode. Come to Albion with us as we wrap up our first year of TA Playlist.

We also give away two $50 Xbox gift cards on this episode courtesy of site user and Fable fanatic GuardianAngelGG. Congratulations to our winners, BinaryRuse for lucking out in our random drawing and mentoc for their hilarious story from Albion which we share on the show. Check your inboxes for the codes!

While we venture across Albion gaining renown in March's TA Playlist game, Fable II, we must take one brief detour and recap last month's community game as well. Ryse: Son of Rome is the focus of the latest episode of the TA Playlist Podcast. 

In this episode, Kevin praises the game for its setting, Mark forgives its mediocrity because it's a launch title, and Sam at least liked that it was brief. Along the way, plenty of community feedback is shared from an overall much more positive bunch of community players. All of that, plus stats, sequel talks, and we peek ahead to this month's Playlist game. 

In the latest episode of the TA Playlist Podcast, Mark, Kevin, and Sam reconvene to break down IO Interactive's stealth sandbox deathtrap, HITMAN. During what is our longest episode yet, we discuss the story for longer than anticipated, debate the game's artificiality as a devil's playground, and wonder aloud if anyone else feels uneasy from the way HITMAN seems to revel in its violence. All of this, plus plenty of community feedback from voices old and new, as well as our monthly stats review make up for the first episode of 2018.

In the last TA Playlist game of 2017, Sam, Mark, Kevin and a great number of community members traversed the deserts of Egypt in search of vengeance, allies, and countless map icons in Assassin's Creed Origins. Sam takes the hosting duties for his first time as our resident Creed historian and thus he comes down most favorably on the game. Kevin quite enjoyed it too and shares his intriguing fan theories as to what comes next for Bayek and Aya. Mark meanwhile calls this the "final nail" in his dedication to playing the series on release every time. With your forum chatter to supplement the chat, we had another great month and a fitting conclusion to TA Playlist's first calendar year.

• WaitButWhy.com's brilliant two-part introductory blog post on why AI is perhaps the single most important problem facing our species
• Neuroscientist Sam Harris' Ted Talk on the value-alignment problem
• Sam Harris and computer scientist Stuart Russell (mentioned in the podcast) discuss the problems surrounding unchecked AI research

It has been said that in space, no one can hear you podcast. If that's true, don't blast off toward the moon and stars until you've heard the latest episode of the TA Playlist Podcast. With several hundred community members, Mark, Kevin, and for the first time ever, a new voice, Sam, dissect the iconic xenomorph and learn all its ins and outs. Both Sam and Kevin have lived their lives almost completely avoiding the horror genre across all media so Alien: Isolation was a sort of exposure therapy for them, while Mark was making his third go aboard Sevastopol. Listen in to hear how the trio got on with the game, how they learned to adapt to the alien, and how the game taught them to face their fears.

We've now covered half a year of TA Playlist games, and it's safe to say no previous month was as lively as September was for Dark Souls, despite the fact that the stats suggest otherwise and despite the fact that much of the conversation in the forums shifted from "what do you think of this?" to "how do I defeat this thing?" Kevin and Mark have to go on without Will for this episode — listen in to find out why. That topic, as well as the overall fairness of the game's design, the overwhelming sadness of the world of Dark Souls, plus plenty of community feedback paint another lengthy conversation we hope you'll enjoy. Will Dark Souls return in a future Playlist poll? We share our thoughts in this episode but we'd love to hear yours too! 

Thanks to a hefty sale just a few days into the month, the July 2017 edition of TA Playlist, covering all things related to Monolith's Shadow of Mordor, was our most active Playlist community game yet. Nearly 20,000 people played along with us, amassing over six million gamerscore. Will, Kevin, and Mark reconvened to share the best feedback of the month, unravel the story (spoiler: there's not much to unravel), and dissect the game's famous Nemesis System. Along the way, Kevin and Will maybe even became each other's nemeses, but we swear it was all in good fun. No hosts were harmed in the making of this podcast.

We're back with our third month of TA Playlist, the official game club of TrueAchievements. For June's game, Kevin, Will, and Mark, as well as over 2,000 site members, got together to rack up stats, smash up Sunset City to a killer punk rock soundtrack, and weigh the merits of the game's nearly constant stream of meta-humor and fourth wall breaking. Later we demand Microsoft pull out their wallets and purses and finance a much-desired sequel. 

Mark, Kevin, and Will are back with May 2017's TA Playlist game, the violent and brooding Darksiders. Will and Mark come down pretty hard on the game, but Kevin likes it a bit more. The community weighs in too, mostly sharing the sentiment that Vigil Games' 2010 debut is neither awful nor excellent. We hack and slash our way through all aspects of the game before wrapping it up with a preview of June's Playlist offering.

Our inaugural month of TA Playlist is coming to a close, and that means our debut episode of the TA Playlist Podcast is here. Will, Kevin, and I got together recently to fully unravel the enigma of Remedy's 2010 thriller, Alan Wake.

In this debut episode, we consider some early impressions of the game from both ourselves and the community and weigh the merits of its TV series presentation. Later, Will unloads on Alan as a character and Kevin doesn't exactly defend our titular novelist either. By the end, we're all still scratching our heads over the ending before we wrap it up with some achievement talk and a look ahead to May's game, Darksiders.