Hot Button

Hot Button’s 2025 Game of the Year Deliberations Part 2

It is time. Come here us debate the winners and losers in our final group of GotY categories for 2025: Biggest Surprise, Most Disappointing, Worst Game, and then the top 10 Best Games in ranked order!

Episode 124: My Bloody Valentine in 2-D - The History of Doki Doki Literature Club

It’s a Valentine’s Day special to break up our Game of the Year bonanza as we recount the development and controversial outcome of when an anime indie horror dating sim took the internet by storm before then becoming the center of attention from it’s connection to multiple real world tragedies. 

Hot Button’s 2025 Game of the Year Deliberations Part 1

2026 is here! Before we fully embrace that though, the crew must first definitively and collectively decide on which video games topped our lists for 2025 across eight exciting categories! The batch for today include: Best Aesthetic, Best Story, Best Character, and Best Moment or Sequence!Best Aesthetic - 0:02:54
Best Narrative - 1:24:50
Best Character - 2:24:40
Best Moment or Sequence - 3:21:55

Episode 123: Hot Button Year-Seven Edition

Happy holidays, listeners! Our gift to you is that we’re not dead and we have also dedicated ourselves to updating the massive amount of topics that we’ve covered since we started all the way back in 2018. What is Peter Molyneux working on these days? How much does Poop Slinger cost? Tune in to find out!

Episode 122: “Hentai_Overflow” - The Time Bigoted Hackers Took Down LittleBigPlanet and Titanfall

Today we take a trip back to 2021 to have a concerning conversation as well as share some insights on the insecurities and impermanence of online video game ecosystems. This along with witnessing, in two different examples, the worst of what can happen when your once beloved property is taken over by the dregs of the internet.

Episode 121: Not Like This - The Sad Story of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5

Let us relive some trauma on this episode as we dig into the dark chapter of one of the absolute best franchises to ever grace gaming. Turns out that underfunding an inexperienced studio to tackle a major project in an unreasonable time frame is a poor path to success, who knew!

Episode 120: The Seven Deadly Sins of Dante’s Inferno

Who’s ready to party like it’s Easter Sunday, because this week we’re going to get blasphemous and explore what is probably the most elaborate and insane PR campaign for a video game ever. Seven full months of religious-infused stunts destined to promote the character action title that time forgot. Ain’t no sunshine into these layers of Hell!

Episode 119: The Joy of Sex - A Hot Button Guide to Love Making

It’s an 18+ adults only Valentine’s Day special today as we break out the worst console ever made, the Philips CD-i, and recount the true story of when a “sex manual” from the early 70s was bizarrely adapted into an interactive video game from the early 90s. Not even the folks responsible can hide from us!