Podcasts
Methodical Monster Hunting in ‘Hunt: Showdown’ [Safe Room Podcast]
Before diving into this week’s new horrifying episode of Safe Room, check out last week’s Horror Bytes discussion.
There is no other game in the multiplayer space quite like Hunt: Showdown.
To describe Hunt as a competitive first-person shooter doesn’t do the game’s depth of mechanics justice. By the same token, simply calling it a monster hunting game is an oversimplification of the possibilities within each match.
Hunt is very much an enigma in the gaming space, as it redefines the traditional sense of success in multiplayer.
You prioritize hunting, killing, and banishing the boss monster in one match. In another, you camp a boss’s location while picking off other players to steal their bounty. Or perhaps you spend a match racking up XP by killing AI-controlled grunts.
Each avenue can have deadly consequences, yet the player can yield immense rewards for succeeding.
In Hunt, players define what that success looks like on a match-by-match basis. Empowering players with options and choice allows even the most crippling of defeats to yield some semblance of player progress.
But is that progress hindered by Hunt‘s steep learning curve?
For this week’s episode, Neil and I attempt to answer that by recruiting friend of the show, and Bloody Disgusting writer, Aaron Boehm to dissect the methodical monster hunting of Hunt: Showdown. – Jay Krieger
If you’re curious about playing Hunt: Showdown, and want an idea of what to expect, Aaron has written a tips and tricks guide for newcomers to the game. You can find the link to it below.
Tips and Trick for Hunt: Showdown Newcomers by Aaron Boehm
Safe Room is a weekly horror video game discussion podcast with a new episode releasing every Monday on iTunes/Apple, Sticher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Linktree for additional streaming services.
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It’s been a busy month on Murder Made Fiction podcast. In addition to introducing a new co-host (Perfectly Good Moment‘s Amanda Jane Stern), we spent Pride Month tackling a wide variety of Leopold and Loeb fictional adaptations.
In 1924 Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb plotted to commit the perfect murder when they abducted and killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks. As Amanda outlines in her primer on the case, the men were caught almost immediately and the media circus that followed was billed “the trial of the century”.
Listen to Leopold and Loeb mini primer.
The fallout has reverberated throughout the last century as countless books, plays, musicals, and films have drawn on the case for inspiration. Some are more faithful than others, such as Richard Fleischer‘s 1959 drama Compulsion, which stars a young Dean Stockwell as Leopold and Orson Welles as the boys’ lawyer, John Darrow (named Jonathan Wilk in the film).
Listen to Leopold and Loeb: Compulsion (1959).
Then there are the texts that use the idea of queer-coded killers as a jumping off point, but confuse (or flat-out disregard) the details of the real life case in favour of jumbled fiction. That’s what happens in Barbet Schroeder‘s Murder by Numbers, which awkwardly introduces a tortured backstory for lead actress (and executive producer) Sandra Bullock. The result is an uneven film that misunderstands which of its two competing storylines are actually interesting (hint: it’s the Leopold and Loeb stuff with Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt).
Listen to Leopold and Loeb: Murder by Numbers (2002).
We ended up discussing other (often more successful) titles on Patreon, including 1992’s Swoon (a New Queer Cinema art-house take on the crime), Michael Haneke‘s 2007 Funny Games remake, and gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson‘s Scream, which proved to be a much more reverent and sly interpretation of L&L than we anticipated.
We wrapped up the month with a final summary episode about our favorite adaptations before chatting with author and archivist Erik Rebain, who literally wrote the book on Leopold (Arrested Adolescence) and maintains one of the foremost websites on the crime.
Watch our discussion on YouTube below (or listen here):
Next month: For July, we’re turning our attention to the Boston Strangler, with a look at films from 1964 and 1968, as well as the most contemporary version from 2023, starring Kiera Knightley and Carrie Coon.
Want even more true crime adaptations and Murder Made Fiction? Support the show on Patreon to listen to the aforementioned episodes, as well as a full-length primer on the case and 160+ hours of bonus content.
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