This week on The Free Cheese, the Midway Knuckle®.

How do you reinvent an arcade game for the end of a console generation sitting right on the edge of always-online gaming? Midway Studios San Diego attempted with 2005's Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. Playing as one of the four core classes from the original Gauntlet, we play through several stages fighting waves of enemies, destroying the generators of their origin, and defeating one of the titular Sorrows.

This week on The Free Cheese, oh, I get it.

We add another shooting game to the list with Konami's parody of its own Gradius. We talk about how other games were born from the Parodius series and wonder why there has yet to be a modern collection. We weigh the difficulty of enjoying an arcade game both on a console and for ranking on a weekly podcast, and dream of new characters for an inevitable Apple Arcade release.

This week on The Free Cheese, there's like, a hole in your head.

Just in time for QuakeCon 2022, we add Quake to The List. While we've all been into id Software games and have played a range of games inspired by Quake, we've yet to play all the way through the original campaign. This episode changes that as we learn the secrets within, revisit the history made with Quake, and learn how to rocket jump.

This week on The Free Cheese, we should always fear shrimp.

What happens when the Ace Combat team makes a Star Fox game? We take on the Aparoids to save the galaxy as Team Star Fox in the Namco-developed Star Fox Assault. We talk about the history of Star Fox games and how many reboots the series has endured so far, and of course wonder where it will go next.

This week on The Free Cheese, time to check the list!

We break our list of games from this season into 4 categories and reflect on the choices we’ve made so far. As we revisit each game, the chance of the list changing entirely rise. Will the list look different in the end or did we get the rankings right the first time?