WarrenM
2641
I’ll give that one a shot. I tried to listen to the Joystiq one this morning and after one of the guys yawned 3 times into the microphone, I deleted it. Hopefully the Eurogamer guys will have some sense of professionalism or, you know, pride in their work.
Man, I hope so … I’ve been a bit desperate for a decent weekly for chores since Idle Thumbs shut down.
And most of my material was exhausted through holiday travel.
WarrenM
2644
I’ve tried 3 of these podcasts already and I’ll be damned if they don’t all suck. Fuck. Just people blathering on about NOTHING. Jesus, have a topic before you start recording! I don’t want to listen to you and your buddies palling around and snarking at each other. I want to hear about some god damned video games. sigh
Time of season isn’t helping.
Jazar
2646
I feel your pain. I don’t listen to gaming podcats for stories about your life.
The end of the Irrational podcast is fucking hilarious.
Damned you are.
It’s entirely possible that podcasts simply aren’t your thing.
WarrenM
2649
Not so. I listen to a ton of them at work. The ones that stay on my playlist have a host (or hosts) who have something to talk about and they do something radical - they talk about that subject! Sure, there’s some joking around and such but they generally stay on topic. It’s not pointless meandering for 10-15 minutes before the subject is even approached.
The gaming ones I’ve tried - they seriously sound like someone pressed the RECORD button 15 minutes too soon.
I’m with you on this, and it means that I end up fast forwarding through some podcasts.
Thing is, there is an audience out there that really likes this sort of thing. I had a listener email me a month or so ago suggesting that TMA would be better if we weren’t so wedded to the topic and engaged more as “personalities”. (I took a quick sampling of my listeners and found this to be a minority opinion.) His argument was that he listened to gaming podcasts to get to know “us”, and that since we already had an audience for the material, we should shift to something lighter and more ad hoc.
But yeah, I prefer that a podcast choose a topic or two and get to it pretty quickly.
Troy
To each their own.
All of my favorite gaming podcasts have been pretty personality driven. CGW Radio and then GFW Radio. 1up Yours. Idle Thumbs. Giant Bombcast.
Admittedly, all of these are very different animals from TMA. They’re all gaming news podcasts, whereas TMA is a topic-based podcast. In a gaming news podcast, there’s only a limited amount of news one podcast (much less many podcasts) can cover. So adding in the aspect of a heavy personality-driven ‘whatcha been playing’ sort of segment makes a lot of sense. When you have a specific game for everyone to discuss, it’d make a lot less sense.
WarrenM
2652
I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing. If they were talking about “whatcha been playing?” that would be listenable. I’m talking about joshing around, ribbing each other, talking about inane bullshit for 10 minutes. Like you’re waiting for the bus and the people beside you are having a conversation about something you don’t care about.
The problem is that if you have a topic and no personalities, you get boring. REALLY boring. Very fast. And if you have a personality slate but no topics you quickly get annoying and tiresome. The solution is to have personalities and topics, but, let’s face it - there’s a lot of podcasts out there that don’t have enough of one, the other, or possibly both.
WarrenM
2654
The problem is that if you have a topic and no personalities, you get boring. REALLY boring. Very fast.
I’ll hold up Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe as an example of what I want. I feel that I get a good dose of personality on that podcast and they are consistently on-topic.
Jazar
2655
I don’t remember 1UpYours Classic ever getting too personal. They spent 98% of their time talking about games. Their personalities came through that.
Personally, I’ve had a dramatic drop-off in the number of gaming podcast subscriptions I keep. I generally like to pair them up with a non-gaming thing for my listening pleasure while I’m at my desk, slaving away in the salt mines for our robot overlords, and I’m having a harder and harder time getting parity that way. I’m basically down to the 1Up podcasts (some of which get promptly skipped if they get on my nerves, and none of which are updating on any kind of regular schedule outside of David’s and Jeremy’s), Giant Bomb, and now I get to have a little bit more Elliott gently inserted into my earhole. Oh, and Three Moves Ahead and Tom’s podcast for the board. Some other stuff comes in (still haven’t processed The Brainy Gamer from year-end - sometimes those guys make me want to choke somebody), but that’s it for regular stuff, and meaning absolutely no offense to those individuals (actually, the ones that post on here are the ones that I routinely end up sitting through - I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but you really put together a stellar bunch of talking there, Troy) about half of what I do receive ends up getting skipped through because it’s either putting me to sleep (Mobcast - not really a first thing in the morning adventure; they need to get Seanbaby on as a regular to keep me awake) or annoying the living crap out of me (Tina, Sharkey, Chris guy who’s in New York, you know I love you like family, but if you don’t talk about a game I give a tin shit about some time in the near future, I’m going to have to burn that subscription with fire).
The really weird thing is that the gaming podcast universe works precisely the opposite of how other podcasts I listen to function. Any of my subscriptions that are up over 100 feature consistently entertaining people talking about topics (or deliberately not talking about topics - SModcast wouldn’t be the same if they had talking points), and I assume that’s why they’ve gone as long as they have, but if I go to the longest running gaming podcasts I end up with stuff that makes me want to break bricks with my forehead. Maybe I’m just a bad gamer or something. I’ll have to turn in my license to replace letters with numbers.
Ideally, personality should come out naturally through discussion of the subject.
This was very thoroughly entertaining! Seeing things from the development side was a welcome change, and the last minute or two had me cracking up on my drive into work.
Great job Shawn, Ken, and everyone else involved! :)
Yeah, I’m pretty much the same way. I dig the chemistry that the Giant Bombcast guys have so much that I’m currently making my way through their whole archive. I think I’m in August, 2008 right now. And those guys certainly go off the tracks all the time.
Oh, hey, I see Tom changed my username. …Carry on.
