Folks who only met me recently probably don’t know too much about my older podcast project, The Book of Megadrive. Which was more accurately a spin-off of Snexploration Squad and shared the same feed. These were kinda…chaotic retro games podcasts that were attempting to straddle the line between a mbmbam improve comedy thing and an actual real discussion of the games as games and historical objects. This focused on semi randomized SNES and Sega games selected via random list and voted on by audience.
So the short answer is probably not. The spoons for editing are lacking in the hosts. There is technically an unreleased episode I attempted to edit but got really dissatisfied while listening to it, and I’ve basically moved on to other projects, like Hinge Problems.
Podcasting about video games is really hard. Talking about game mechanics without visuals? Tricky. Explaining the nuances of how a game feels? Even harder, there isn’t really existing language for that! When you add the random element on top and you have to try and maintain enthusiasm for a 5/10 boxing game or licensed platformer that doesn’t even have anything unique or noteworthy about it, that plays exactly like the other five games like it you’ve played…you hit dead ends a lot.
Plus: playing games takes time effort and focus! You need to put a lot of yourself into it to even bring it to a conversation that might not have anything to talk about.
And games as like an art form…they still are trying to figure out how they work y’know? They came up in an environment so thoroughly entrenched in capitalism it’s hard to divorce games from consumer objects. It’s like if movies went from the train coming out of the tunnel to Sharknado and Marvel. So few of them are worth talking about seriously. Finding ones that are take way more time on top of all the other stuff.
Besides, top of that, Licensed games pretty much always just turned to discussing the source material. Which went ok but…it wasn’t really a game cast those times? And it felt weird for us?
So Cania and I got way more into Streaming since like…you just put the game on and go. We still talk about them as much as we can but it’s just easier this way.
War Movies by contrast take twoish hours of looking at a screen. And thinking about it, War Movies are usually all based on real places and are at least contextualized by real events. They have actual stories, bad and good, that can be talked about easily. They’re much more likely to have themes and even ideas worth discussing, intentionally or unintentionally.
A lot of 16-bit games lack a narrative of any sort of depth and focusing on gameplay leaves you essentially having to talk about nothing but Dolly Shots and Editing if it was a movie, if that makes sense?
Again, there are absolutely games worth talking about but you need to do digging, and the format just didn’t work for that.
I really appreciate you hyping up the cast in specific, @EarthShaker, so I’m sad to say…yeah it’s done. Cania and I have been talking about what we might do next though, knowing what we know now. And you bet we’ll post about it here when we do.