The Flipside of Gaming
For this perceptive podcast, the YouTube channel Indie Enjoyer reached out to want to chat about covering indie games, and what it’s like to be a Youtuber today who enjoys talking about smaller and underrated games.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? Who knows.
Actually I do know, because the three of them were introduced in the 32X game, and one of the few reasons to have gotten a 32X during its short lifespan, Knuckles Chaotix, suggested tagline: “It’s not great, but it is very weird.”
That game had absolutely nothing to do with detectives. I think the detective angle was added with the lore behind Sonic Heroes. From then on, they’ve popped up at random times, usually being pretty hapless. But all three of them are adorable, even and especially Vector the Crocodile, and mean well.
So for now there’s three things having to do with the Chaotix Case Files, a trailer (2 minutes):
…an introductory Episode 0 (9½ minutes):
…and a full Episode 1 (26 minutes).
And here is a link to it as a podcast. They’re roughly of a Saturday Morning Cartoon level of maturity, which I should be clear, is absolutely perfect for these guys, so pour a bowl of Trix, inundate that vessel with milk, and let the part of you that’s still ten years old listen in and enjoy it.
They even got Rebecca Sugar, creator and runner of Steven Universe, to write their theme song!
It’s been a long time since I’ve recorded an episode of the podcast Roguelike Radio, not just because it was on hiatus for some years, but also because I fell away from it for a while because of Life Terrible Life. But I’m back, and it’s here, and also in it is Rob “ASCII Dracula” Parker, who has a really great pseudonym.
It’s on the most recent Shiren the Wanderer game, The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, a.k.a. Shiren 6, and I hope I’m not spoiling things when I say it’s really fun. The episode is an hour and a half, we had a great time recording it, and here it is!
Roguelike Radio #159: Shiren 6, with Rob Parker and John Harris (1h29m)
For this podcast I did, we took a look at the Shooter genre focusing on the 2010’s, when more RPGs elements were added to shooters and the rise of the “Role Playing Shooter”.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Ultima Online is a wonder. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004; Ultima Online started in 1997. And it’s still going!
When it was new podcasts were not yet a thing! Podcasts arose from the fusion of periodic MP3 audio content and RSS feeds, in October 2000. Yet when UO was new there was an audio show called Battle Vortex that covered it. So we can’t call it an Ultima Online podcast, because those didn’t exist then, but it was a whole lot like one.
Battle Vortex had been gone from the internet for awhile, but now the whole show, 156 episodes, has been uploaded to the Internet Archive! It is a priceless snapshot of the early days of MMORPGs, and it’s heartening to see it housed someplace that will preserve it.
Battle Vortex (Internet Archive)
For this Perceptive Podcast, I sat down with Konstantinos Dimopoulos for another chat about open-world design and creating meaningful spaces for the player to explore in a game. We spoke about how open-world gameplay has evolved and the push and pull between environmental and level design.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
The podcast Arcade Attack interviews former Atari designer and programmer Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone! His introduction identifies him as the creator of the first FPS. Is he? I do not know for sure, but it seems awfully plausible. I think it’s a little distasteful identifying him by his connection to a genre that, when he created Battlezone in 1980, wouldn’t even exist for a decade yet. Rotberg’s accomplishment feels more profound than that, but Battlezone is definitely foundational!
Arcade Attack: Ed Rotberg interview (an hour 16 minutes)
Ryan Veeder has made (and continues to make) podcasts about playing various Zelda games.
The Hero’s Path is about replaying Breath of the Wild. 54 episodes, about 42 hours in total. Here’s the RSS link.
The Complete Guide to Koholint was his first Zelda podcast, and it discusses each of the 256 overworld screens of Link’s Awakening. 256(!) episodes. They vary in length between one minute and 47, with most being just a few minutes long. RSS.
The Complete Guide to Termina covers various elements of Majora’s Mask. It’s at 21 episodes, and is ongoing. RSS.
For this Perceptive Podcast I sat down with Righteous Hammer Games’s Clint Jorgenson to discuss the work on his deckbuilding survival tactical game Zor: Pilgrimage of the Slorfs. We talked about going from AAA to indie, and the many challenges indie developers face.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Friend of the blog Matthew Green had a bout of ill health recently, but seems to have weathered the biological storm, and is back and ready to roll once more. So it seems a good opportunity to plug his gaming blog Press The Buttons, and his podcast Power Button.
Press The Button has been around so long that it was a thing while @Play’s former home GameSetWatch was still updating, and even got linked from there once or twice. And Reset Button just uploaded their 345th episode! Were here are hoping they keep the lights on there for a long while yet.
The wonderful podcast Keep Nintendo Weird (Podchaser – YouTube), which spotlights a lot of awesome and unusual games made for Nintendo systems, recently covered a doozy: Space Station Silicon Valley! One of a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64 by DMA Design before they became known as Rockstar North, SSSV is a clever and charming action puzzle game where you’re a microchip that can take control of robot animals in a rogue space station.
It’s notable for its trademark humor, its inventive gameplay, and a weird bug that, as I discovered personally soon after its release, actually makes it impossible to finish! While the main story can be completed, one of the optional trophies hidden in the levels won’t collect when you come into contact with it, and it was a couple of generations before software patches could be distributed after a game went live, so there is just no way to 100% the game without hacking either it or your save file somehow. Oops!
We here at Set Side B are about computers, and we’re about games, and we’re about the intersection between the two, which happens by accident to include Northwoods Radio Sleep Baseball, available as individual files, and also through Google and Apple‘s podcast systems.
People have remarked about the powerful soporific effects of having a baseball game playing on the radio when you’re trying to fall asleep at night. But there are several difficulties with using baseball for sleep-producing: there’s not always a game on, when the game’s over there could be any loud thing on afterward, and there’s always the chance something exciting might happen that would rouse you from your repose and briefly cause you to care.
Sleep Baseball solves all of these issues. The games played are not on a radio but on your phone or computer, as audio files. The Sleep Baseball league is entirely fictional, so there is no actual drama. And the announcer is pretty relaxed and low-key, as are all the ads (for fake products and businesses), so you don’t have to worry about sudden bursts of interest.
If you’ve followed Sleep Baseball before, you should know now that they have recorded their third game, and have recorded some new ads. If you had gotten tired of the same game and events between the Big Rapids Timbers and the Cadillac Cars, it might be of interest to you to give the new recordings a try. Sweet dreams!
