Tag Archives: One Life Left

Fun, Videogames

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).

Videogame Events

GameCity 2008: Thursday

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Macharium Concept for the hero robot

I got to Gamecity a tad late, so missed the Eyetoy stuff in the morning, which I didn’t mind missing much – since I don’t have a PS3 🙂 I visited Indiecade for a bit before meeting Alice – who I met at GDC and another IGDA scholarship winner – and moving to Gatecrasher for some talks.

Firstly was the session “Amanita Design : Inside Macharium EXCLUSIVE” – the designer (I presume Jakub Dvorsky despite him not being named anywhere in the programme as presenting it) walked us through most of Machinarium, then went into the team and how levels and the games are designed – very interesting, especially since they solely use flash. Machinarium should be out next May or so I think he said, which is ace, despite me being poor at the puzzles in the game (feedback is a problem).

At the same time it was on, I missed David Braben talking about Lost Winds – he did, I was told after it, a similar talk to what he said in Brighton at the Develop conference, including his part about used games.

Next I saw the end of Tom Kim’s talk about how games helped him through illness (a brain tumour), which was very interesting. He explained his difficulty with playing games that kill people too.

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Geeky David Jaffe

Sadly, the Splash Damage guys doing “Splash Damage : From Frags to Riches” were late, and clashed with From the “From the Desk of David Jaffe” talk – and of course no one mentioned it either. Oh well, I missed them 🙁 but I got to ask David Jaffe some questions about some topics 😀 (like leaving Sony for instance).

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Absolutely fucking awesome!

After this was DS Night for an hour and a bit, where we got some good 8 player Mario Kart going – then onto One Life Left’s curry evening show. The show was great, with live 2 live doyouinverts songs (with part of the band, since the others were on tour) being “7 out of 10” and “Random Encounter”, and Craig “The Rage” McClellan doing some of his older poems live! At the end I also got an amazing thing to remember the night – the doyouinverts band member gave me his lyrics (attached authentically to a menu) and Craig gave me his poem copies – noting there were more then he read out, so he had to choose. Awesome 😀

I did get videos of the doyouinverts and Craig performing and 2 of the OLL record breaking stunts, they’re on my youtube channel I’m trying out, and in a playlist too. There’s a lot more pictures too in my gallery.

Throughout the day, I got autographs – since the Gamecity “Programme” was a brief thing which looks like a Passport. At the end of the day, I got the Gamecity organisers, all the One Life Left crew, Amanita Design and Tom Kim sign it – David Jaffe would have been tough to get, being on videocast though 🙂 Great way to remember the things going on though, I’ll get more today (Friday) I’m sure.