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Diving Back Into ‘Bioshock’ For its 15th Anniversary! [Safe Room Podcast]

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Before diving into this week’s Bioshock discussion, would you kindly give last week’s episode covering Hunt: Showdown a listen?

At the inception of Safe Room, Neil and I had both made mental checklists of games we simply HAD to talk about on the show. Games that we felt so passionately about that one of us would have to whack the other with a stick to get a word in edgewise.

For me, that game would be Bioshock

Experiencing the descent to the underwater dystopia of Rapture will forever be a formative moment in my gaming history. It sounds like hyperbole, but at the time, Bioshock truly opened my eyes to the storytelling potential of video games. 

In an era where my high school days primarily consisted of playing shooters until the wee hours of the morning with friends, Bioshock presented me with a rich, thematically laced world that I’d only thought possible in film and literature. 

 And 15 years later, the wonderment of what Irrational Games, 2K Boston and 2K Australia were able to achieve within the seemingly simple framework of a first-person shooter is not lost on me.

Helping Neil and I to unpack why Bioshock and its influence are still notable with the medium all these years later is writer Michael Pementel. Apart from being a massive Bioshock fan, Michael is an essayist and pop culture critic who currently writes for Bloody Disgusting and is the staff writer over at the heavy metal news site The Pit. – Jay Krieger

Safe Room is a weekly horror video game discussion podcast with new episodes every Monday on

iTunes/Apple, Sticher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Linktree for additional streaming services. 

Feel free to follow the show and hosts on Twitter:

Safe Room | Neil | Jay | Michael

Podcasts

‘Death Becomes Her’ and the Horror of Aging [The Lady Killers Podcast]

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“This is life’s ultimate cruelty. It offers us a taste of youth and vitality, and then it makes us witness our own decay.”

Is there anything more terrifying than the relentless passage of time? It’s a bitter truth that just when we’ve become accustomed to our bodies, the sands of time turn and we’re forced to watch them slowly break down in a cruel march towards inevitable death. But what if there were a way to stop the aging process – a potion that would return us to our peak physical condition and hold us there until the end of time? Would we take it? And would we eventually find that the blessing of perpetual life is actually a curse? No film explores this dilemma quite like Death Becomes Her. Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 horror comedy pits two showstopping divas against each other for a single spotlight while asking what they would do for eternal youth – and what will be the hidden cost?

Madeline (Meryl Streep) and Helen (Goldie Hawn) are old frenemies with a history of vicious competition. Madeline seems to have won the most recent battle and married Helen’s fiance Ernest (Bruce Willis), but decades later, their marriage is on the rocks and Madeline’s once thriving career is now a thing of the past. When Helen returns with a stunning new look, Madeline turns to unorthodox methods to maintain her feminine dominance. She drinks a potion designed to give her eternal youth, but returns home to find her life turned upside down by her downtrodden husband and jealous “friend.” Having both taken the potion, “Mad” and “Hel” engage in a bitter fight to the death over years of petty snipes and the right to claim the title of Most Desirable Woman.

In their latest episode, The Lady Killers dissect these two glamorous killers and the hidden social commentary in Zemeckis’ iconic film. Co-hosts Jenn AdamsMae Shults, Rocco T. Thompson, and Sammie Kuykendall dish over their own fears of aging, choose their favorite diva, and decide whether they would take the potion should they ever find themselves in Lisle’s (Isabella Rossellini) lavish home. How does the film hit differently when watching as an adult? Could Madeline, Helen, and Ernest ever make a polycule work? Is Lisle a hero or a villain and how does she keep that gorgeous necklace in place? They’ll wrestle with these questions and more in a podcasting shovel battle to the death on this unique horror comedy and one of the most glamorous casts of all time.

Stream below and subscribe now via Apple Podcasts and Spotify for future episodes that drop every Thursday.

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