Couch Podtatoes

Doone's back for another round of the Digital Frontier. This time around we're diving into the topic of historical accuracy in games, and how this can be troublesome. In some cases it feels like we're being lied to, and in some cases big portions of the truth are omitted to avoid offending people. It's a touchy subject but we look at it from all angles. I also think I should make mention that I picked up a new headset recently, and this is the first time using it to record, so any feedback you have on my sound quality would be appreciated! That's all for this week. Up next is another episode of Doone's Digital Frontier as he has another topic he wants to share for the month of February. We'll see you then!

This week we're diving into the topic of Collectibles. First we talk a bit about what we've been playing as usual, then we get into the discussion about things we've collected personally, and trends we've observed in our culture and the marketplace. It seems like we aren't really big collectors outside of collecting ALL THE GAEMZ, but we'd love to hear from you guys and what you're passionate about collecting.

I've seen quite a few conversations on blogs and social media, about how the poster just doesn't "get" YouTube. Why it's popular, why so many people are watching it or producing content for it. We attempt to answer the question "What makes YouTube a valuable resource" in this episode. We go over various types of videos that we've seen and watched ourselves, along with sharing some of our favorite channels. You can find some of those channels listed below if you'd like to check them out. Hopefully this will help some of you dip your toes into the service. Let us know if it did help! Otherwise, enjoy the show.

This week marks the return of Doone for a new season of Doone's Digital Frontier. This time around we talk about how games can literally disappear due to them being treated as a service and not a product. We share anectodes, random facts and more while poking fun at each other and everything else. You know, the usual for a Couch Podtatoes show. This episode also comes packed with 100% more dick jokes than usual, so don't say you weren't warned. We also highlight a cool project where a ton of old arcade and console games have been curated online, and think that more projects like this need to come to fruition. If you want to check out some classic games, all for free, visit the Internet Arcade at Archive.org. Thanks for listening!

This week I go it alone, because Eri was preoccupied and I know that I had a bunch of different things going on over the weekend. I already had these show notes plotted out prior to recording, so I knew it was something I could handle solo. I believe the last time we had a "talking points" show I did it by myself as well. Either way, there were several stories in the news recently that I wanted to talk about, along with some personal observations over social media and the blogosphere that I wanted to mention. Note that I wasn't trying to single anyone out with my observations, there were more generalized things that I felt the need to mention. It's also shorter than our shows have been for a while, so that should be good for your attention span. That's really all there is to it! Enjoy the show!

Sorry for the late episode, busy week is busy. This week we've decided to expand upon what we were talking about during the tail end of last week's show, where we touched upon the trends of 2015. So we're going back through gaming's history as we know it and examining some of the most popular trends over the years. We talk about a bunch of games, a bunch of periods of time and share some of our personal gaming histories as well. There are a lot of good memories there, and hopefully even if some of it is before your time it will still be interesting! That's really all there is to it, so grab a drink, take a seat and listen in.

Welcome back to Couch Podtatoes and Happy New Year! Around this time last year we recorded a show where we talked about what we were looking forward to over the course of 2015, so we figured we should do the same thing, but of course we’re talking about 2016 now. We have lists of games we talk about briefly that we look forward to getting our hands on, and we’ll also be talking about trends that we’d like to see continue. As the holidays are finally over, we should be back to the regular weekly schedule. We hope you enjoyed your holidays, and continue to listen to our rants and rambles for the foreseeable future. That's about all there is to say this time around, so see you next week. 

Holy crap, we can't seem to make a short episode anymore. But hey, it's the end of 2015, and we're taking a look at our favorite games of the year, and doing a little gushing about them. Also shit talking on each other's lists, because we all know that mine is superior. We'll still let Eri think that hers is, as it's better for my health. So yeah, there really isn't a whole lot to say in this intro. Have a listen, let us know what you think about our lists, and tell Eri you think she's wrong. That should do it for the year. We won't be back with a new show until Janurary, so have a happy holiday with your loved ones, from the Couch Podtatoes.

Last week we had planned on putting a show out, but things were busy in my personal life, so I gave Eri the option of putting something together herself. She didn't snag anyone to guest with her, and apparently recorded some bits on her own but wasn't happy with the result. Either way, we're sorry for not getting something out there. We made up for it this week with a strange turn of events. We already had the content for this show laid out before recording, but out of nowhere Doone appeared on Twitter and started asking us when we wanted to do another show with him, so we threw him the invite and he joined us for the discussion this week. However, Eri had an appointment and the show was running rather long, so she had to dip out part way through our conversation. Doone helped me finish up the episode and we cover what we thought were some of the biggest gaming industry stories of the year. There's was a lot to cover and I'm sure we missed some tidbits of news but we got to a bunch of it. As a result the show

A big occurrence just went down in the MOBA sphere. The preseason for Season 6 has kicked off, and with patch 5.22 there have been some big changes. You might have caught my recent post detailing my changes when it came to the new masteries, and we touch upon that and many other changes that have occurred. I'm joined by three other bloggers and fellow LoL players and we discuss our thoughts on the changes, various things we thing will be fixed and how toxicity could potentially be reduced in the new season. There's anecdotes from our play time sprinkled in with theory crafting, jokes, memes and reddit stuff brought up too. As a result this is a lengthy episode, but with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, we aren't going to be releasing a new show next week, so this extra long show should keep you held over for a while. With that said, you can expect to see a new episode on December 4th. See you then.

Remember that thing we called "Actually Playing Games" a couple of weeks ago? In it, we discussed a game we had been playing together, Warhammer Vermintide, and then decided that the next game we'd play together was Secret Ponchos. We did play Secret Ponchos, but decided it wasn't the type of game that would make for a very long conversation. Plus, Fallout 4 came out, and we couldn't stop playing it. So, we start off talking briefly about Secret Ponchos, and then move onto talking in-depth about Fallout 4. We tried to avoid spoilers, but if you haven't played the game yet or haven't explored much of The Commonwealth, keep in mind that we do talk about some side quests, various funny things we've come across and talk about one of the factions a little bit. Mostly though we concentrate on mechanics and systems and compare this title to previous iterations. I think we sound like we're gushing over it for the most part, and I'm not ashamed of this. Feel free to share your Fallout stories with us in the comments.

This week we dive into the topic of Permadeath Mechanics. First we talk about things we've been playing this week, then dive into the discussion. We talk about some examples of games that use the mechanic (mostly Rogue-likes and survival games) successfully, but then we also try to figure out a way for these types of mechanics to work in MMOs. That's really all there is to it, so grab your favorite MP3 listening device and enjoy!

This week marks the debut of a new periodical series we'll be doing on Couch Podtatoes. We're calling this series "Actually Playing Games" and we talk about what the series itself will be all about. *SPOILERS* It's about us actually playing games. Seriously though, we have our usual conversation about what we've been playing, then we talk about this new segment, and finally decide on a game that we can play together, and use that game as a discussion point on a future show. We ended up picking a game that is more of a multiplayer deathmatch, so we will talk about the ins and outs of the title along with our recommendation to either pick it up or avoid it like the plague sometime in the future. Today's show is sort of stream-of-consciousness in that we openly discussed what game we would play first, but then we talk at length about a game we've been playing a lot of recently: Warhammer Vermintide. That's a good sample of what the next episode in this series will be like, and at the end of each of these shows,

This week's show marks the last Digital Frontier of the year, as Doone informed us that along with being super busy with real life stuff and his expanded family, he knew that he'll be even more busy with the holidays coming. We'll probably be busier too, so don't be surprised if we take a week or two off when the holidays arrive. The topic at hand for this show was the good, the bad and the ugly surrounding the gaming community, but as is usual during a Digital Frontier segment, we talk about all sorts of media and social constructs. Overall I'd say we agree that the gaming community could be better, but that it's not as bad as it could be either. There's still hope for improvement. We were a little more free form this time around, and did the whole show without notes, so hopefully it still sounds up to par with our usual efforts. Also, don't mind the static sounds coming from the background occasionally, apparently the storm of the century was going on at Eri's house while we were recording so you

So Doone was supposed to be on the show this week but had to bow out because of a sick broodling. He promised to be on again next week, but we won't hold our breath ;) As a result we had to pull a random topic out of our asses and decided to talk about violence in our media. We managed to also talk about a bunch of games and some anime, plenty of other parts of social and traditional media and had a blast doing so. I think it turned out pretty good for given very little preparation time. I guess doing this for so long has its advantages! On a side note, it's been quite a while since we've had a guest on the show outside of Doone, so we'd like to put out an open call for anyone interested to come be a guest and talk about random stuff with us! If you're interested your best bet would be to hit one of us up on Twitter, and that info can be found at the bottom of this post. Anyway, enjoy the show.

Apologies for missing a show last week. Followers of my blog will know that I injured my back and was unable to record. Things are better now, so we're back on schedule, actually a little early! This week I brainstormed the topic of the show and was inspired in part by this article that was linked by Gypsy Syl during a conversation on Twitter. From there we delve into the topic of the value of video games, and some philosophical discussion about what value is and really it comes down to being a subjective thing. We're sure many of you can relate to our thought processes though, and of course we'd love to know what you think about the topic.

Early release this week because we got things recorded on time and I had little going on today so the editing was a breeze.  I finally managed to get Doone on the show after a little over a month, and though we had been trying for the past couple of weeks, his succubi children have drained him of all life. We have however found the solution! From now on we'll be playing some games together beforehand so that he'll stay awake to record. Seemed to work well this time anyhow. So with Doone on the show that means it's time for Doone's Digital Frontier again, and of course that means having a more philosophical discussion about games, and this time we're tackling the Narrative. Not only the narrative of individual games and the stereotypical definition of narrative itself, but also the narrative of our steam libraries and what stories these lists tell about our personalities. Still with me? It will all make sense once you listen. Enjoy!

The first thing you're probably asking yourself is what happened to the show last week? I made a small announcement on Twitter, but basically my computer managed to crash while editing and I lost the files. We do a little rehash of what we discussed last week before moving onto this week's discussion. You'll probably also notice that the intro music has changed, and that's because after 61 episodes Eri finally admitted to not liking it (but she forgets giving the seal of approval way back when!). She agreed to this new music as well, but we'll see what she says in a year :P So for the discussion this we we're looking at remasters and compilations, which was spurned mostly from my recent play time with some of these types of games. We attempt to answer the question, "is it too soon sometimes?" That's all there is to it, so grab a couch and listen in!

This week we drew inspiration from a concept first brought to my attention by Void of the blog "A Green Mushroom." He was the first person I'd heard the term "evergreen" from, and he applied that to gaming in an interesting way. This coincides with a concept I had talked about previous with "session-based" games to a certain degree, so we go into that as well. We try our best to define what we think evergreen games are, and dive into a bunch of examples throughout the show. As always, we're interested to hear more from you about the topic, so feel free to leave us a comment!

We ran short of any bulky discussion ideas so this week we decided to do another talking points show. This time around we talk about Diablo III, Hearthstone, GTA V, the newly formed YouTube Gaming, Star Citizen and more. It's a variety of articles pulled from the news of the day, so we're all over the place but it still ended up being a cohesive package by the end. You know our rants and rambles, so listen on for more!