The most Scottish podcast I’ve listened to. Scottish folks who grew up with the Mega Drive assign each other a game–not necessarily MD, but usually something from an old console–to play, and then present their impressions on it to the group in the next episode. For a gaming discussion show, it’s a good shtick. They don’t always get some details/facts quite right, but the discussions are insightful, interesting, and entertaining.
Ended up skipping most of the first 50 episodes due to poor audio–and more intermittently after that–but they seem to have sorted those issues out in recent years, hurrah!
Maximum Power Up podcast episode 80: Interview with the PS UK marketing chief of the time, Geoff Glendinning, who describes how they implanted the PS1 in the UK club scene.
It may have had an influence, but apparently Psygnosis was still operating more or less like a third party studio at that point, and it was the film’s producers who approached them.
Civ IV lead designer Soren Johnson interviews Civ co-creators Bruce Shelley and Sid Meier, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix designer David Sirlin:
This series covers the history of wrestling video games. From WWF, WCW, ECW, Japanese promotions, independent promotions and more. As well as upcoming games yet to be released.
Two wrestling game fanatics go over old games and series, and complain about new ones; listening to this, you start to realize that the purpose of many of these games is not so much to be a challenging adventure, but to let hardcore fans recreate their favorite wrestlers and matches.
A surprisingly large segment at the end of each episode goes to chronicling the latest developments in what sounds like the extremely lucrative industry of collectible wrestling dolls action figures.
this podcast about stafford beer and salvador allende’s project of cybernetic management / planning of the chilean economy under socialist lines seems pretty interesting.
haven’t listened to it yet, though. the emphasis seems to be on stafford beer and the cybersyn project, but i do hope they draw on the broader context of the popular unity government so it doesn’t end up being the same techno-fetishistic narrative euro-americans always tell when talking about this topic.
this period of allende’s popular unity government is super informative of all sorts of patterns that still play out among progressives in liberal-democratic states all over
Two veteran British game journos are good at talking about AAA games. Also sometimes visual novels and detective games.
Other podcasts by people from The Back Page:
PC Gamer UK (ended)
The Rotating Platform (ended) - Over-elaborate sci-fi framing device, occasional not-very-funny joke segments, first two surviving episodes rather rough; aside from that, still some decent game talk
with dozens of episodes worth of recorded content that will remain undiscovered until some distant aeon where future archeologists try to reconstruct the 21st century from the contents of that hard drive
“Carbonara Timestamp was a typical name for people in the dark age of the early 21st century” these archeologists will say
If archaeologoists try to reconstruct the 21st century from my hard drive they’re gonna think that our entire culture is obsessed with GI Joes acting abstractly stupid
Mentioned by @Ymer, @Rudie and @Cerium in various threads. Some stuff in earlier WAHP episodes hasn’t aged great but the three ex-Gamefan hosts provided perspective and insights on the Japanese game industry and Japanese gaming culture from the now-distant years of 2010-2012 that I hadn’t heard elsewhere.
(Also it was their contemporary incessant fanboyism of Demon’s Souls and then Dark Souls–this was a period where Japanese console gaming was at something of a low point as the industry there had bet big on handheld gaming rather than investing in learning how to make games in HD, but certain things were developing that in hindsight we now know become huge later, like the Souls games and Yakuza/Like a Dragon–that, listening to it now all these years later, finally got me to try that series for myself.)
Forgot who said it but there’s an episode around when Yakuza 4 came out when they said the series was getting really stale and should end soon and I think about that comment a lot.
