Bargain Bin Gaymers

Davey is flying solo at for a chat with two guests who are, frankly, serious gamer couple goals. Max and Pablo are Cowboy Toad Games, the boyfriend team behind 2024's Nocturnals, the game that kicked off this podcast's love affair with LGBTQIA+ developed games. They're back with the sequel, Nocturnals: Cacti Coast, currently in development for a 2027 release. Max returns for his second appearance on the show, and Pablo joins for the first time. In this episode:
What it actually feels like to have your partner make a video game as a love letter to you, and why Pablo says the more valuable thing was the two of them landing their dream job
The moment they realised Nocturnals was going to be a career and not just a passion project
The new companion system: characters who travel with you, whose interests sometimes conflict, and who can be absent from your playthrough entirely
Choosing where to go, including the slaughterhouse, and why location choice makes each player's story their own
Keeping Ted grounded while adding stealth, because he's a scared young man and not James Bond
Writing characters who are so closely based on yourselves that a fan wiki lists Ted and Diego as a real couple living in Cornwall
Meeting Izzy, the bratty new companion voiced by Max's little sister, plus Randy and Maria
The lessons from the first game's spaghetti code, and how better organisation now means a dialogue change takes three seconds instead of a re-render
Playtesting revelations, including the friend who kept walking straight into the cannibals
How Pablo's soundtrack is evolving: real instruments, proper software, and recurring character motifs this time around
Why Cacti Coast is worth the wait to 2027, and what the extra time buys, including localisation, mobile done properly from the ground up, and Ted's journal system
The relationship question: how do you run a business, ship a game and stay boyfriends? Areas of responsibility, honest expectations, and a hard stop at the end of the working day
Play the original Nocturnals on Steam or mobile, and follow Cacti Coast development on the Cowboy Toad Games Discord.

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Dr Xavier Ho returns for a second week running — same shirts, narrative continuity intact — for a proper conversation about where queer gaming actually sits in 2026. It's a topic week, not a yap week, and the topic is a big one. Mitch reckons he's simultaneously never been more represented and less represented. Davey has noticed the platforms, storefront features and Pride Month spotlights quietly disappearing. Xavier, fresh off six months of leave, has been playing nothing but indie games — and that's where all the queer stories are. In this episode:
Where queer representation has gone: why the good stuff has been relegated to indies while AAA plays it safe
The "quiet chill" — Gayming Magazine's Robin Gray going from 20+ awards sponsors to four or five, and storefront Pride features vanishing
Shadow banning, age verification, and the itch.io/PayPal delisting that made queer adult content unsearchable and unsellable
Why the tabletop and TTRPG scene is thriving where digital is struggling — and how it got safer after 2013
Discord's age verification problem for people who aren't out
What good queer representation actually looks like: Mitch wants big, loud, memorable and unmissable; Xavier makes the case for slice-of-life (We Are OFK); Davey wants rebellion
Where to actually find queer gaming spaces in Melbourne right now — including ACMI's long-running women and non-binary game nights
The funding problem: devs literally relocating interstate to qualify for different grants
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Dr Xavier Ho from Monash University returns to Bargain Bin Gaymers, and it's Yap Week at the Bulldog — three gaymers squeezed onto one couch, one associate producer named May, and enough industry talk to power a small game studio.

Davey, Mitch and Xavier get into the news that's actually mattering right now: Microsoft cutting 3,200 Xbox jobs and spinning off Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs. Is this the end of AAA as we know it — or the start of a proper double-A renaissance?

In this episode:What everyone's been playing — Sunderfolk (Xavier's D&D-style party game), NieR: Automata (Mitch's philosophy homework), and Assassin's Creed Black Flag Remake (Davey's current obsession)
The Xbox reckoning — 3,200 jobs, four studios spun off, and whether Compulsion, Double Fine, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are actually better off free
Is gaming heading for another crash? Davey brings up the 1983 E.T. moment and asks whether GTA 6 could be the harbinger
The double-A renaissance argument — why Gen Z doesn't care about photorealism and why the middle tier is where the best games are coming from
Sony's tone-deaf social media moment — because reading the room is hard
A packed Release Radar covering every game landing before end of July: Fading Echo, Tears of Metal, Avatar Legends, Disgaea Mayhem, Dino Blade (yes, a Souls-like where you're a Spinosaurus with a sword), Ronin, Splatoon Raiders, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD, Halo Campaign Evolved, BloodRayne, Sextet, Mistfall Hunter, Truxton Extreme, and Xenoblade Chronicles X
The Bargain Watch List: Xavier flags the Non-Binary Coded Games Steam Fest (running now) and the "Figuring It Out" itch bundle of queer identity novellas and short stories
🎧 Xavier is back next week for a deep dive on the state of LGBTQIA+ gaming — subscribe so you don't miss it.

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Mitch thought Fox McCloud was just a Smash Bros character. Time to fix that. Gen Z Plays is back: Davey sits Mitch on the couch (with Pike the dog supervising) and hands him an N64 controller to play Star Fox 64, the 1997 classic Australians knew as Lylat Wars. Then, for the ultimate glow-up comparison, they fire up the brand new Star Fox remake on Nintendo Switch 2. Same game. 29 years apart. In this episode:The Lylat Wars story: why Australia got a different name, how Star Fox 64 launched the Rumble Pak, and the sequel that was finished but never released
Mitch's honest verdict on the 1997 original: genuinely inventive branching-path design, "hideous" graphics, and villains who all sounded suspiciously fabulous
RIP Falco, lost in the very first level (famously)
Everything you need to know about the 2026 remake: Velan Studios' shot-for-shot glow-up with a new voice cast, real-time cinematics, orchestral score and 60fps
The big debate: is $99.95 AUD fair for a shot-for-shot remake of a 29-year-old game? ($84.95 on the eShop, $89 at JB Hi-Fi)
Slippy Toad voice discourse, hot Falco takes, and why remakes might be the smartest way to introduce a new generation to classic franchises
Davey's plea to Nintendo: give us a proper sequel, and remake Star Fox Adventures while you're at it
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Do you enjoy owning the things you pay for? Sony has other plans. This week Davey and Mitch dig into the biggest shake up gaming has seen in years: Sony announcing that physical disc production for all new PlayStation games ends from January 2028, GTA 6 launching in November with no disc at all (that pre order box you paid up to $159.95 AUD for contains a download code and a dream), and the PS3 and Vita digital storefronts closing in some markets from August 2026.

The boys go full investigative journalism on the economics of it all: why pressing a disc costs cents, who actually pockets more when you buy digital, and why Sony has always hated the pre-owned market. Plus the environmental angle nobody agrees on, with one study saying discs are 100 times more carbon intensive and another saying the exact opposite, and the genuinely nuanced (drink!) conclusion that the greenest game you can buy is a second-hand disc from the very bargain bins this move is about to kill.

Then it's a proper pros-and-cons showdown. True ownership, preservation and price competition versus instant access, convenience and the fact that digital distribution is the reason most queer indie games exist at all. The conversation gets real about deplatforming, payment processor pressure on Itch and Steam, and shadow banning of queer content, because when digital is the only copy, delisting can mean erasure.

Also in this episode: Davey falls for The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (the cozy JRPG that screams $45 but costs $90), Mitch grabs NieR:Automata The End of YoRHa Edition on Switch 2 for just $22 AUD, the Release Radar covers Moonlight Peaks, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Digimon Story Time Strangers, Echoes of Aincrad, Palworld 1.0, Ascend to Zero and Dtopia, and the Bargain Watchlist rounds up the Steam Summer Sale, PlayStation's July Savings and the eShop's shockingly cheap Final Fantasy VII deals. All prices in beautiful Australian dollarydoos.

It's Dry July! Davey is raising money for cancer research. Donate here: https://www.dryjuly.com/users/david-willett

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