Millennium Edition | GameCube, Dreamcast, and Games of the 2000s
Millennium Edition is an original podcast from the Sound Stone Network covering the GameCube, Dreamcast, and other games from the late 90s and 2000s. Join writer, teacher, and podcaster Sean Douglass, along with co-producers Gooey Fame and Darren Hupke, as they explore topics in video games from this turn-of-the-millennium period. Rather than being purely a retrospective, Millennium Edition focuses on what makes the games of this time still so relevant and current today. And along with celebrating the creativity of Nintendo and SEGA at the time, the show also explores the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and other consoles of this time period...
Happy Housewarming: How Luigi's Mansion Set the Tone for the GameCube
Luigi's Mansion was an unconventional launch title to introduce new players to the GameCube. With Luigi in the starring role and playing completely unlike other Mario games, it didn't embrace the broad appeal we'd come to expect from other launch titles like Super Mario World or Super Mario 64. And yet, Luigi's Mansion would go on to become one of the GameCube's highest-selling games, and its expressive characters, lighting, and environmental effects proved to be an amazing graphical showcase for what the new system could do.
In this episode, Sean and Gooey revisit Luigi's Mansion, looking back...
Appreciating Dark Cloud Today—Beyond the "Zelda Killer" Hype
As press got their first glimpses of Dark Cloud for the PS2, some hailed it as a coming "Zelda killer" and the PlayStation's answer to Nintendo's storied franchise. This narrative would follow the game through its development and even into its reviews. But looking back more than two decades later, was all this hype really justified? And did premature comparisons to Zelda—when the game was really going for something very different—blind people to the game's unique identity? For this episode, we have two Sound Stone Network founders and Millennium Edition co-producers on the panel, as Darren Hupke host...
Finding New Depths to X-Men: Next Dimension Two Decades Later
For this episode, Sean is joined by Ben, a former comics journalist who covers fighting and comics-related games through his YouTube channel @sandalwoodgrips, for a conversation on the 2002 X-Men fighting game X-Men: Next Dimension. While Next Dimension might be an underrated title that never made a big splash in the fighting game scene at the time, both Sean and Ben are huge fans of it, and Ben continues to pour hours into the game to discover the depth, complexity, and incredibly broken tech the game has to offer. Through his Discord (https://discord.gg/pKpa5psG), where a small...
Maken X is a Surreal, Sublime Brainjack and Slash Adventure
Maken X, from many of the developers behind the Shin Megami Tensei series, is a sci-fi first-person sword fighting game that came to the Dreamcast in 1999. From its experimental gameplay to its branching international story filled with eccentric characters, it plays like nothing else. And while it may not be perfect, it's still a perfect example of how a game doesn't have to get everything right to still be artistically memorable and a lot of fun along the way. For this episode, join Sean Douglass, Andrew Elmore, and Fredo Fabrucci and they pick up the demon sword and take...
Is Link in Soul Calibur II the Best Fighting Game Guest Character?
Welcome to Millennium Edition! Millennium Edition is a new original podcast from the Sound Stone Network exploring video games form the last 90s and early 2000s. And rather than just looking back at these games, with this show we particularly want to reflect on how these games remain both relevant and current today. Various technological advances at the time led to games of this period aging particularly well, with, as we noted in our show description, many of them today feeling both nostalgic and surprisingly modern all at once.
Writer and teacher Sean Douglass (@seandouglass.bsky...
