Podcast 25 – Art Attack!

Dust off those berets and scarves, boys – Andi’s away this week, and we’ve siezed the opportunity by doing a podcast that would otherwise be impossible, what with Andi interrupting to talk about fighting, football, or women’s vaginas. After the usual inane rubbish about what we’ve been playing this week (with a bit of sidetracking to talk about games that support 3D glasses), we issue a full and frank apology to Michael Pachter, then launch into a discussion about two items of genuinely decent games TV that have surfaced over the last month or so.

The first one is Into The Night With Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford, a brilliant and interesting documentary which you can watch here thanks to some guy being kind enough to upload it to YouTube. If you’re not aware, Jason Rohrer is a programmer and game designer most famous for creating the incredible Passage, while Chris Crawford is a game industry veteran who quit his job at Atari 17 years ago to pursue his dream of creating the interactive storytelling system, Storytron. While we don’t agree with everything said in the documentary, it raises some interesting questions and is definitely worth a watch. Especially if you want to know what the hell we’re talking about on the podcast.

The second show we discuss is the ‘War on Videogames’ episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullsh*t! - which, as you probably know, is a long-running show featuring the titular duo trying to tear down common myths and misconceptions about whatever issue has got them all riled up that week. In this episode, they tackle the notion that videogames make kids violent – the show’s stance being that they don’t, at all. It’s very one-sided, and isn’t going to end the debate by any means, but it’s still entertaining and has a few interesting points to make. Again, made available to you by a kind soul on YouTube. Be sure to say thanks, eh?

This podcast episode is a bit less jovial than usual, but hopefully some of you will appreciate that. Those of you who don’t will be glad to hear that Andi should be back with us next week, boring us all to tears about Streetfighter IV and drinking cans of Relentless.

Cheerio!

(Quick update: We said we’d link to the Johnny Chung Lee stuff – it’s here. Although a bit of googling reveals that the head-tracking feature was removed from Boom Blox. Poo.)

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