Tag Archives: Idle Thumbs

Game Podcasts

I irregularly listen to the Giantbomb Bombcast. They’re now doing membership ($50/year, or monthly $4.95, woo…). Hmm. Just: No thanks, while the irrelevant ramblings and absolutely off-beat podcast length might be unjustifiable as a cost, why make it that long in the first place? They even mention it during this 45 minute long one; they say they like it but it takes lots of time (and so money! “money going out the door”; “what do we get out of that? it’s a hard thing to quantify and a hard thing to monetize”, and going on into adverts on podcasts)…so…hmm, not shorter then; quantity over quality after all.

Instead they split it up into two separate hours. Justification? Other Whiskey Media sites don’t do such a long podcast. This weird split is done so free users get the first hour on time, but the second hour later. Kind of splits it up badly, but there we go.

Oh well, their choice. I guess we’ll see if it works for them. One reservation about this is that Giant Bomb would be pulled directly in two ways; from the people paying subscriptions and advertisers. I hope they’ll keep their quality up, hopefully it won’t slip – if I pay for a site I’d be expecting a level of service that I otherwise wouldn’t expect from free sites. Sadly I don’t expect that level of paid quality from Giant Bomb so can’t justify paying for it 🙁 but maybe they’ll prove me wrong: they’ll have to do it that way around first however.

With Idle Thumbs now gone 🙁 I’ve now got very limited good game podcasts to listen to. I’ll be giving Yet Another Gaming Show a chance, but what others are worth the time? Anyone got any? I guess I’ll try looking around the major sites to see who does a reasonable one.

Edit: no longer a mini-side post!

Technology and Videogame Podcasts/shows

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I’m half interested in promoting that I listen to these, and also half wondering what other ones I’m missing out on – but I’ve been listening to weekly podcasts for a while now and having some more for when I travel and so forth would be awesome. List any you think are good in the comments please 😀

I personally listen to, in no particular order (and with RSS and usually iTunes links on each page):

  • One Life Left – which has irrelevant humour, some surprisingly good discussion randomly, and mostly some great features and the odd bit of music. Is also an hour long, which is nice.
  • Tech Weekly by the Guardian’s team. Yes, I still dislike the the “Videogames shoved into technology section” part, but I’d likely listen to it anyway (in addition to a videogame one. You listening Guardian?), since it has a good mix of technology news and discussion, and with some good comments about what is in each episode I have missed the ones I don’t want to bother with.
  • Idle Thumbs now has 2 podcasts – a UK and USA one. I’m going to listen to the UK one this week, and the USA one is good – rather random discussions, and also a big bonus in the form of funny songs 🙂 There’s some good writers and people who do the shows, despite the very American “Well, you know” thrown around a lot. Worth a listen!
  • The Rock, Paper, Shotgun Wireless Show is a nice if a little hard to hear one, randomly produced whenever the RPS guys get together. I’m a PC gamer so it’s all good for me.

I’m also going to see what the Mega64 podcast is like, although I’m looking for more to listen to. I’m willing to expand my horizons, simply because there’s barely a few hours of regular content in the ones I currently listen to since some are so happenstance (with One Life Left and Tech Weekly being the most regular).