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 leave. It's also a fitting backdrop, because this episode is all about taking an adventure you used to play and asking it to sit still on a page. Somebody looked at a whole quest built on mashing buttons and said, "What if the only button left was 'turn the page'?" The bravest thing you can do is lick your thumb. That's a bold leap from the action genre to the paper-cut genre, and we're going to take a hard look at The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in comic form. Josh has agreed to walk us through it from beyond the event horizon, where time runs a bit slow, so by the time you hear this he's technically still on his first sentence. That also makes him the only guest we've ever had who can offer a genuine link to the past, a pun I've been sitting on since the moment he said yes. We had to be careful with the mic placement, since anything left within Josh's reach gets stretched into a very long strand of spaghetti. Lesson learned about the pop filter. So please keep your arms, legs, and any nearby light inside the episode at all times, and don't panic if the audio shows up a few billion years late. Nobody has ever returned from a black hole to leave a bad review, which honestly might be the best business model in podcasting.

When the going gets tough and everybody is trying to keep you from getting what you deserve, someone has to have your back. You just might not like what they're doing to make sure you're safe.

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 stone fist and a wisecracking demon without needing either film's actual story. It's the video game equivalent of a cover band that only plays originals. And that giant stone fist deserves a moment, because it's doing some real character-design heavy lifting. Hellboy is built around exactly one absurdly oversized body part, and that's basically the whole design manual for a certain flavor of comic book tough guy: pick one appendage, blow it up past the point of reason, let the silhouette do the talking. Todd McFarlane ran the identical play with Spawn, except he went south instead of north, handing us a hero who could probably punt a sedan but might struggle to tie his own laces. One big fist, one big boot. Same weird design instinct, opposite ends of the body. Which is a good excuse to bring in George Marston of Spawnography, the podcast where Pierce Lydon joins in to spend their time in the giant-boot corner of that exact design philosophy. George is flying solo this round to see how a giant fist holds up against a their usual task of studying a giant boot. So pick your favorite oversized body part, brace for a beat-em-up that seems mildly allergic to its own source material, and let's find out whether The Science of Evil earns a place next to del Toro's films, or whether it belongs exactly where most tie-in games end up: forgotten. And don't forget about the Nazi occultism.

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 on two separate handhelds that weren't even talking to each other, like a superhero team-up where nobody checked who else was showing up. Somewhere, someone looked at the specific joy of slapping a foil Spider-Man card down on a table hard enough to rattle the juice boxes, and said: what if we replaced that with a stylus tap? What if deck-building, the sacred art of jamming eighty cards into a rubber band and hoping for the best, became a scroll menu instead? Visionary. Extremely quiet. Nobody's little brother has ever stormed off in a rage over a scroll menu. Dealing me in for this one is Gen Moonen, co-host of the "Fun" & Games Podcast alongside Matt Storm, a show built entirely around two people who genuinely, unapologetically love games, which honestly should be a requirement for every gaming podcast and somehow still isn't. So grab a deck, or a controller, or whatever the modern version of "shuffle and pray" is, and let's find out if Marvel Trading Card Game is a genuinely good time, or a lesson in why some hobbies were never meant to leave the kitchen table.

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 discipline of a Swiss watchmaker and the restraint of absolutely nobody when it came to naming the things. Four games! Four years! Somehow four completely different amounts of the word "World Championship" crammed into each title! And somewhere in that run, things got weird. By the last entry, Konami had apparently decided Yugi, Kaiba, and the rest of the cast had done enough work, and quietly let you duel the actual monster cards instead, like the whole show got replaced by its own trading cards in some kind of legal dispute. There's also a tiny RPG town nobody asked for, a cartridge somehow refereeing six languages at once, and just enough real cardboard cards taped inside the box that there's a real argument the packaging outsold the game. Grabbing a seat at the table to help me sort genuine dueling nostalgia from pure cardboard-fueled compulsion is William Morgan, host of The Geek Gauntlet Podcast, self-billed as the fastest hour in podcasting, a claim that tracks given how fast he and the crew burn through a week's worth of comics, movies, anime, and gaming news. So keep an eye on your Life Points, don't forget your face-downs, and let's find out if the World Championship series was Konami's finest run of Game Boy dueling, or just years of very well-packaged déjà vu.

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 the exact same title for a Game Boy Advance platformer, and said: actually, what if his nine lives were a farm, a haunted house, a circus, a sewer, a tree, an alley, an obedience school, and a lab? No pyramids. No space combat. Just Garfield, freshly stuffed from an eating binge, suffering eight increasingly damp nightmares about locations you could reach on foot from his own kitchen. Climbing out of Garfield's nightmare to help us survey the damage is Derek B Gayle, who hosts or co-hosts what feels like an ever-multiplying stable of shows including Walloping Websnappers, Gimmicks, Skreeonk!, and, at this point, so many other podcasts that keeping an accurate list may violate several laws of podcast physics. If Garfield hates Mondays, Derek looked at that same feeling and apparently decided the correct response was to start four more podcasts to fill the time. So raid the fridge, settle in for a night you won't remember fondly, and let's find out if Garfield and His Nine Lives earned its spot next to the caveman, the pharaoh, and the astronaut, or if it should've stayed exactly the kind of dream you forget the second your alarm goes off.

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 and then, in an act of scheduling chaos I can only respect, shipped the game three entire days before the film hit theaters. Bold! Confusing! Possibly the result of someone losing a calendar! And then, because apparently one platform was never going to cut it, Ubisoft just kept going. PlayStation 2! GameCube! Xbox 360! Wii! PC! A PlayStation 3 version that got paraded around at trade shows like a prize pony and then quietly put out to pasture, never to be seen again! And just when you think the roster's full, Nintendo DS and PSP roll in with an entirely separate game wearing the same name tag, because why make one turtle game when you could make several turtle games and let the consumer sort it out. Also, bonus points to whoever in marketing decided the title needed zero subtitles, zero colons, zero numbers, just "TMNT," like it's the only one that's ever existed. Confidence! Climbing out of the sewer to help me survey this multi-console fever dream is Jeremy Powers, host and creator of the Zenspath Entertainment Network, a man who apparently collects retro hardware, works as an engineer, and still finds time to run a podcast, which is either elite time management or a full refusal to acknowledge the concept of a day off. So track down whichever version of this thing actually ended up in your house back in 2007, because statistically there's a good chance it wasn't the same one as your neighbor's, and let's find out if TMNT earned its spot in the turtle hall of fame, or if it should've stayed a trade show prototype.

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. Somewhere in that flood of Ninja Councils and Clash of Ninjas sits Naruto: Path of the Ninja, the entry that decided the best way to honor Kishimoto's story wasn't just punching (though there's plenty of that too) but actually letting you live through the Land of Waves and the Chūnin Exams one turn-based battle at a time. Path of the Ninja debuted on the Game Boy Advance in Japan back in 2004, then took a leisurely three years to reach American shelves in 2007, arriving on the Nintendo DS instead, because by the time they got around to localizing it, the GBA already felt like last decade's news. You pick from six familiar faces, Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Shikamaru, Neji, and Rock Lee, pair them into formations for bonus combo attacks, and work through more than 90 jutsu, some of which you cast on the DS touchscreen by frantically scribbling a shape with the stylus, which is either a clever nod to hand seals or just a fun way to give yourself a cramp. The story runs all the way to the Chunin Exam invasion and a face-off with Shukaku, and if you're wondering whether you can also fight Itachi as a secret bonus boss, the answer is: only if you own the Japanese version. The English release quietly deleted that fight but somehow forgot to scrub his name from the end credits, which is the video game equivalent of hiding a body and leaving the shovel leaning against the wall. Making another through the Play Comics dojo is Merrilee O'Neil of Fear Coded, last seen on the show trying to keep pace with the Flash. This time she's trading super speed for shadow clones, hand seals, and a Konoha headband, so at least the running is a little more sustainable. So form your hand seals, grab your kunai pouch, and let's find out if Path of the Ninja earned its headband as a worthy trip through early Naruto, or if it should've stayed back at the Academy with the rest of the genin.