4521

there’s a couple i listen to regularly and a handful others that i grab when i just need something in my ears. this is excluding the qt3 gamecast.

the cruncheons - laid-back, hilarious and always capable of intelligent worthwhile discussion. somewhat pc-centric, but mostly all over the place in terms of topics and focus.

warning! a huge podcast - a podcast about japan gaming. with episodes up to four hours long and subjects covering a wide range of japanese culture, i can tend to tune out. but this is worth it simply for those occasional moments of great insight that you simply can’t find anywhere else. i’ve gleaned a lot of fascinating info from these guys.

sometimes i grab weekend confirmed or giant bomb. with WC i’m almost always disappointed. they’re just sorely lacking in interesting personalities and minds. too many cookie cutter opinions that i don’t care for. giant bomb is alright. don’t find it very funny and the games critique never tends to break surface level, but passes the time i guess.

4522

Seriously, the only podcast I listen to is Quarter to Three, and that’s only on occasion!

4523

This one? http://www.pcgamer.com/category/podcast/uk-podcast

I just listened to the most recent episode – liked it.

4524

If you are indeed of the PC Gamer UK podcast, then I definately find you guys endlessely listenable. It might be the accents though, hard to say. I can say when you do finally put out a podcast, I always listen to it immediately, and I only do that with one other 'cast (Giant Bomb).

4525

It’s definitely the accents.

Thanks though. I’ll tell the guys.

4526

Pretty good, will be listening to more. The audio isn’t great because it sounds like they’re recording through skype. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

4527

Yes, nice job, gents. Brits talking about games makes them sound infinitely more respectable.

In the latest one, I was glad to hear your discussion of the indie games festival. Particularly enjoyed hearing about FTL; hadn’t heard of that before and it sounds right up my alley.

4528

Do you guys like GWJ more or less now that they’ve “diversified” the crew? Back when it was the core guys every week I listened all the time. Now the site has a bunch of writers I’ve never heard of and the podcast has a bunch of people I don’t find interesting to listen to. I want the Shawns, Julian and Rob, and occasionally some Cory. Who are these other people? :(

4529

On that note, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show is back after the longest weeklong gap ever. I really hope they’re able to stick with it.

4530

Speaking of the PC Gamer UK Podcast, would anybody here (Tim, perhaps?) happen to have a copy of its Episode 38, subtitled “Karma Minds” at hand? I listened to all the others, but the download link for that one’s unfortunately broken and, judging from the comments on the website, seems to have been for some time. I wasn’t able to find an alternate download location and didn’t get a reply when I tried to contact them by e-mail, but would really like to listen to it.

4531

This week’s Jumped The Shark podcast (sic intentional), we get Bill talking about Dark Souls a week after he finished it and talked about finishing it and put a hopeful postmortem on 5 weeks of Bill talking about Dark Souls for 20-30 minutes each show. No really. At least then he switched to Saints Row 3 for a bit, which was nice. Then Todd for the 4th straight week tries to Tom Chick about Skyrim and is unable to make that be coherent for the 4th straight week.

Then they talk about their biggest disappointment in games for 2011, but manage not to mention the the Jumping The Shark Podcast–which for me is right up there.

4532

I don’t know if they are trying to diversify but Laura on gwj always drags the show down for me.

4533

Jumping the Shark has lost a lot of energy. Part of the problem is the format, which features them going on about what they’ve been doing lately in the top (whether it’s interesting or not) and then discussing an increasingly small and inconsequential topic (whether they’ve got any actual expertise on it or not). Both of those parentheticals are problems. I’m sorry about the crippling bone spur, but it’s okay for Bill to just say that he hasn’t been able to do anything other than the game we’ve already heard in excruciating detail from him about because of, you know, the crippling bone spur. And Danielle is starting to grate on me for reasons that I don’t understand. She probably said something about programming or design like three months ago that I found to be ill-informed and now I’m holding a subconscious grudge or something. So that’s a me problem, but the rest…

Some suggestions:

  1. You get one game in the what you’ve been playing segment. One. Because, let’s be honest, we’re only really interested in the only one that you’re interested in right now.

  2. More better guests. You know all those developers that used to show up on 1UpYours? They went on that podcast because they were people who actually sounded interesting when they talked about things. Tim Schafer and Ken Levine and any number of former podcasters who are now in development - and seem like they’ve been there for long enough to have SOMETHING authoritative to say about SOMETHING (looking at you, Shawn and Chris) - these are all fun and interesting guests to get. Hell - bring on Jeff Green and do a topic segment about casual games. You can have that one for free.

  3. Be willing to cancel. As pissed off as I am right now that iFanboy won’t be doing any video shows for the rest of the year, and the fact that this will utterly screw up my Sunday lunch routine (and, as you might gather, routine is very important to me), I’m glad that they’re taking a break, rather than trying to force out a show when the circumstances aren’t right, either because they lack the inspiration or, more likely, because they lack the necessary number of people in the same room (which is three, because those mini episode things they staple together are alright, but they’re not the same thing). It’s okay if you guys have to take a week off. Or even two. There should never, never, never, never, never, never, NEVER be a podcast featuring just Brandon and Danielle. Never. Two is not enough people for that, because you’re not a podcast about news, so even if you had good chemistry between the two people (you don’t most of the time), there’s nothing there for you to riff on.

I’ve been using Shark as my kickoff podcast for the week, but I’m getting dangerously close to demoting it to the mess pile and replacing it with practically anything else. The new Games Dammit will probably be good until they run out of steam, as virtually all topic podcasts seem to. The Joystiq Show is pretty excellent. Help me out here, guys.

4534

For me it’s the habit of repeating punchlines other people have said, only worse. And the “cool and interest” description on everything. And the inevitability of everything she says - she has her interests and nothing really goes beyond that. Her Saints Row/Bioshock/Mass Effect love isn’t quite Dark Souls level but add that in to the quirky indie stuff she’ll always talk about and you can write her script for every episode.

If that sounds like nit-picking, well… it probably is. And that’s the problem; we’ve been listening so long without anything changing that I think we’re getting weary of the same voices discussing the same things with slightly less enthusiasm than the week before. I really think they need to change the format or the scheduling (every 2 weeks for example), because it feels like they’re doing it because they feel obligated.

Having Tom and Troy on recently only served to show how much better it is when there’s vaguely fresh voices capable of sparking new discussion.

And I feel guilty about even complaining about this podcast :(

4535

Does any podcast do a “topic of the week” segment that’s consistently (or even usually) good? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. It seems really hard to pull off. Perhaps this is simply because your well of good topics that everyone has something to say about runs dry pretty quickly, and you’re left either rehashing old arguments that we’ve heard before, else diverging from the topic entirely because you don’t have anything to say about it. This is one reason why I think it’s better to let discussions and debates emerge naturally out of news.

4536

I think this is born of podcastying-by-Skype and not being in the same room and thus unable to use nonverbal communication with each other. Danielle’s repetition of jokes isn’t the only example. They often seem to misread each others’ jokes or have a delayed reaction that break up the flow of the conversation, for example. And they often stumble over each other with the “No, go ahead” interruptions. But that seems to happen with every podcast recorded through Skype and is hardly unique to JTS.

4537

Retronauts is the template for that in games. They’ve been going for god only knows how long doing a topic every week, but the thing about them is that their topics are whole game families and they’ve got a massive catalog of stuff to roam around in. The Joystiq Show started out alright, but they’ve already fallen back on the old What Game Did You Game to some extent (they’re helped by the fact that it feels like roughly a billion people work for the site, and two thirds of them are McElroys, which are naturally funny creatures) Kat tried with Roleplayers’ Realm and I think she started running out of gas when she had to turn to more and more obscure (and boring) indie developers. Three Moves Ahead takes the occasional break, but they’ve been a pretty good example of sticking to that format as well, because even though I don’t care about an increasingly large percentage of the games they discuss (I’m coming to the sad realization that I’m just not a strategy game guy), I’m still usually interested in listening to what they have to talk about when it’s not cars driving.

4538

I don’t understand how someone could mis-pronounce Excecutable unless they also mis-prounce Execute? But who knows, I’m sure there are plenty of words I’ve only seen in print that I mispronounce.

Plenty of words change stress depending on which part of speech they are. I don’t have an OED to hand but I think second syllable stress for executable is standard in British English. That’s certainly how I have pronounced it before that podcast, without correction.

So, with everyone agreed that PCG sucks now, what’s the PC gaming cast to listen to instead? Aside from PCG UK, I mean. I miss Dan Stapleton ;_;

I don’t have any PC specific casts other than the PCG ones, but Rebel FM has a lot of PC coverage for a multi-format podcast, and of course TMA trends heavily PC because that’s the strategy game market for the most part.

4539

I feel like I have to chime in here to say that I really love the Jumping the Shark podcast more and more as it’s gone on and appreciate everyone involved for doing the thing every week and putting yourselves out there for people like me to enjoy for free. I think Danielle is fucking awesome. I love her enthusiasm and her take on anything she talks about, especially game design. Bill talking about Demon’s Souls is one of my favorite things as well. He’s a man possessed, and I know that feeling. I love hearing all the regulars’ takes on the topics to the point that the only wish I have regarding the format for the show is that they spent more time on the topics so they could get a little deeper into it. I think they should just keep doing their thing on their own goddamn podcast.

4540

Games Dammit is now a topic of the week show, I’m not sure yet if they are completely successful yet, but I like the approach that the topic can be a game or series as well as a regular topic.
I think that is thing other shows could do, if a game is big enough just make it topic of the week, or if a game is released that has much in common with a older game make that old game a topic of the week, don’t limit your selfs to abstract concepts or existentialist questions for topic of the week.