It all started in the summer of 2006. For me at least... Podcasting has been around for a while before that but I never got into it. In 2006 I was living in Bamberg, Germany [1]; I had no TV service and I had better things to do than read websites all day. Don't get me wrong, I had plenty of free time. A large amount of my time was spent in transit, either between classes, between towns or between countries. At first I thought I'd take a book or two with me and catch up on a little reading, but let's face it, books are dead. I had a Dell laptop with me but I didn't feel like lugging it around, especially because this was the summer of the exploding laptop batteries [2]. One gadget I didn't mind taking everywhere with me was my iPod Mini. I've since upgraded to a Video iPod Nano, which would've been nice to have way back in 2006. My iPod was only 4gb so a few months after moving to Bamberg I was ready to listen to some new crap.
I can't pinpoint the moment I downloaded my first podcast but I'm pretty sure it was CNET's Buzz Out Loud [3]. Buzz Out Loud is a daily podcast about technology, they run through the headlines and what-not. I found it entertaining, I must have, because it started the ball rolling. Before I knew it I was downloading etymology podcasts, NPR podcasts, soccer podcasts... it got a little out of hand, I don't particularly like soccer, etymology or NPR.
The podcasts which I enjoyed the most were all video gaming related. I'm not as much of a gamer as I used to be, not that I used to be all that much of a gamer. My gaming now is limited to World of Warcraft, Civilization IV and the occasional Wii evening. But for some reason, I enjoy hearing about all the new games, lame games and gaming media related minutia. Here are a couple of my favorite podcasts:
SCOOP!
IGN's Game Scoop [4] is definitely one of my favorites. The format is similar to most podcasts, you have a round-table of dudes - which in this case are all video game review editors. They do all the typical stuff like break down the news and all the crap you'd expect. What is different is the Game Scoop guys devote the last twenty to thirty minutes of each show to basically crapping all over their fans. Readers of IGN will submit ideas, jokes, questions, fan art and everything in between for the hosts to bring up during the podcast. One particularly memorable crapfest was when a reader mailed in a picture of his prototype 'ultimate gaming chair' which was just a barcalounger with a bunch of cardboard peripherals taped to it. There was a cardboard box labeled TV, a couple of cardboard speakers, a cardboard fridge and so on. This guy had taken the time, albeit not much time, to put together something and send in a picture which he seemed pretty proud of, only to have the IGN staff shit all over it. It was pretty funny.
One recent recurring gag is the use of a floor fan pointed directly into the mic to simulate 'on the scene' reporting. For example, a few weeks ago there was a news story about Nintendo shipping extra Wii units to America. One of the hosts took the fan and put it right up to the mic and started yelling, "WELL DAEMON, I'M HERE AT THE AIRPORT AND WE CAN SEE THE NEW WIIS ARRIVING AS I SPEAK." The gag continued, "MASS HYSTERIA IS BREAKING OUT NOW AS NINTENDO FANBOYS HAVE DESCENDED UPON THE SCENE!" Apparently it's quite hot in the studio where the Game Scoop! is recorded because the fan has returned each week since. The most recent use that I remember is, "DAEMON I'M REPORTING TO YOU LIVE FROM UWE BOLL'S HOUSE [5]..." Good stuff.
CGW/GFW Radio
I started listening to the CGW podcast in Germany in 2006, it was right before they changed the magazine from Computer Gaming World to Games for Windows [6]. About two podcasts after I started is when they made the switch. I remember sitting at the bahnhof in Würzburg waiting for a train and the only podcast I had left on my iPod that I hadn't listened to was the new CGW. The first line of the podcast was something like "Well, CGW is dead..." which I thought was weird since it was an hour long audio file. This was decidedly the worst episode of the CGW podcast and not a good way to start, but regardless I did listen to the whole thing. My late night train ride back to Bamberg consisted of listening to Jeff Green repeat himself a million times about how, "we're not going to be Microsoft's mouthpiece."
GFW Radio [7] has come a long way since the CGW days, mostly because of the addition of Sean Elliot to the staff. Most of the guys on the GFW staff are nerds, understandably so, Sean Elliot is their counterpoint. He is like the cool kid in High School that also liked comic books and didn't give the dorks a hard time. He is GFW's Seanbaby [8]. Sean Elliot's memorable contributions include Obesia's Mudbutt [9] and the story about someone trying to convert people to Christianity during an online multiplayer game of Company of Heroes.
The 1up Show
The 1up Show is a video podcast. Each week's episode has three or four reviews of new games based on what the EGM or 1up staff is writing about that week/month. What is different about The 1up Show is that you can see what they're talking about. If someone is complaining about a certain feature in the game you can see exactly what they are talking about. For example, when a game has particularly bad load times you'll get to see it for yourself. While all of the obvious games are covered like Halo 3, Gears of War and so on... the cool thing about The 1up Show is that they cover the less well known/marketed games like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari [10]. What the 1up folks do so well is that they avoid doing reviews like on CNET, where you have an editor sit in front of the camera and do a straight forward video review. A year or so ago there was an Xbox event in Barcelona and there was a segment on The 1up Show wrapping it up. It may not seem like anything worth watching but the way they presented it was quite cool. The 1up guys went to a street cafe and discussed the Xbox event over a few beers.
On weeks where there is no regular 1up show scheduled, they'll 'air' one of the filler shows in its place. One of these is Broken Pixels which features Seanbaby, Shane Bettenhausen and Crispen Boyer. The premise is simple, these guys play the worst of the worst video games and do a Mystery Science Theater 3000 critique of it. It really isn't a critique so much as three guys making fun of old video games like Night Trap [11].
The Rest
The rest of the gaming podcasts I started out with in Germany have lost a lot of their appeal in the past two years. For the most part, understandably, people more on. I used to enjoy the hell out of 1up Yours and Legendary Thread, and while I still do enjoy both, I think the reason they were so good was because Luke Smith was on both of them. Luke Smith was 1up's Sean Elliot, only funnier, and he played World of Warcraft. Luke left 1up in early 2007 and the 1up podcasts haven't been the same since. Legendary Thread is still mildly enjoyable, but it's fallen far behind on their schedule and is pretty much a bi-monthly podcast at this point. 1up Yours is still worth listening to, it's a general hodge podge of weekly news topics reviewed by the folks at 1up/EGM/GFW/etc. My biggest gripe with this podcast is Garnet Lee. I'm not sure exactly what his job is but I've only ever heard of him in reference to 1up Yours. He's the most annoying person I can stand listening to, if that makes any sense. He will say some of the dumbest shit... not dumb as in stupid but dumb as in lame. For example he likes to close every show by saying "until next time, we're ghosts..." WTF does that mean? Is it supposed to be cool, cuz it's not. Seriously.
Massively Online Gamer is another podcast I used to enjoy immensely, but it's gone downhill. One of my fondest "podcast memories" was being on the Deutsche Bahn on the way to Wertheim along the Main River listening to MOG. The episode came out right after Mel Gibson's antisemitic arrest that summer. Ryan Vernier went off on a fifteen minute rant about how hilariously ridiculous the whole thing was, I've been a listener ever since. Actually, I stopped listening a couple months back and recently came back. The format for the show seems to have changed quite a bit. Now it seems the podcast is done with Ustream [12] which means the quality is shit. They used to do their podcasts in Vent or on Skype but the quality was fine. The main difference is Ryan or Gary will talk about what is going on in the video feed, which anyone listening on an iPod will miss out on, they also reference some GAX [13] site as if I care. I'd rather have the simplified MOG of 2006-2007, back when video was limited to trips to GDC or Iceland [14].
The Hotspot from Gamespot was always a favorite of mine, until they canned Jeff Gerstmann [15]. The final nail in the coffin was Brad Shoemaker leaving last month. I basically stopped listening to The Hotspot after Jeff Gerstmann left, he was the only reason to listen.