[Episode 27] World Enough and Time for Games

[Voodoo]

http://image.colonyofgamers.com/imcast.png


On this edition of the Immortal Machines Podcast, your time managed cast of Robert [Trebor], Eric [Ravenlock], Bryan [Smoof], and Clayton [Voodoo] discuss what it takes to setup some time to play games. Do you have to wait till all your chores are done, make sure the kids are tucked in, not play on nights when a new episode of your favorite TV show is on, or any of a myriad of items. Are your game playing choices based on how much time you have in a given evening, do you just schedule a series of evenings to pay, or do you just play on the weekends? All these questions are discussed and more.

For the Retro Section the classic Monolith game Blood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_%28video_game%29) is poked and prodded to show just how much fun it was to shoot, kill, and kick around severed zombie heads like soccer balls. Next up in the Indie Section the much heralded Cyber Wing (http://sites.google.com/site/gamecyberwing/) is examined and we all find out how much fun it is to change from a Mech to a Jet with very little fuss. Also knocking down palm trees while chasing the bad guys and shooting ‘em with twin arm mounted Gatling guns is just plan destructive. In the Mod section the fantastic user created addition to the game Company of Heroes, Eastern Front (http://www.easternfront.org/), which adds the Russian side to this classic WWII RTS is played and praised. It is always amazing what the moders can do with some time, patience, and a good SDK.

So click on das mouse comrade to download and play World Enough and Time for Games (http://www.immortalmachines.com/public/podcast/World_Enough_and_Time_for_Games.mp3)

Hosted and Summarized by Robert [Trebor]
Participants are Eric [Ravenlock] and Bryan [Smoof]
Produced by Clayton [Voodoo]

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[Doogie2K]

Were the music selections -- two of which I actually recognized, for the first time -- intended to reflect the discussion about you guys being a bunch of old farts? ;)

Actually, in all seriousness, at first I was wondering WTF Robert and Eric were talking about with all this bountiful game time in college, but upon further reflection, I guess I just distribute my free time more evenly across my interests. I have a bunch of TV shows I watch (though I need to pull the plug on a couple), I have season tickets to the local junior hockey team, I occasionally watch games on TV (though not as often as I did -- my pro teams suck this year), and somewhere in there, I have the odd hour here or there for games. And even that's at the expense of my three-foot-tall stack of books that goes back to Christmas '08, and the eight or so magazines I have from three subscriptions that I haven't read yet, and a video series on the history of the English language my grandfather taped for me in 2007 that I haven't watched yet (to be fair, I also haven't had a working VCR for most of that time), and...yeah.

Still, it'll be nice when I "only" have my summer job to worry about. University is still kind of a bitch if you take it seriously enough to go for As every semester, especially when your Reading Week (think Spring Break, but too cold for boobies) is dominated by three upcoming midterms and trying to finish up a manuscript from a previous summer job.

[Ravenlock]

I did a lot of non-gaming activities in college - theatre, primarily - but I also just had a LOT more time to spend in a discretionary way. Since I wasn't waking up at 6:30 to go to a job, staying up until 12:30 or 1AM every night was no big deal, and I could usually count on at least a few of those nights every week being free for game playing if I wanted them to be.

Weekends, also, had a lot fewer time commitments in them, largely because of a lax dating life (compared to a marriage, which is wonderful but also does take up quite a bit of one's free time). ;)

All in all, it gave me relatively frequent chunks of time - 3, 4 hours apiece - that I could really sink into an in-depth game, and that's something I almost never have anymore. The longest I've been able to game at a stretch in recent memory was probably no more than a couple of hours, and much more often it's a half hour here, an hour there. I still get games played (enough to talk and write about them, clearly), but it's much harder to get through a game that's more than 20 hours or so in length than it used to be.

[Voodoo]

Were the music selections -- two of which I actually recognized, for the first time -- intended to reflect the discussion about you guys being a bunch of old farts? ;)

I almost always choose music selections based on content. In this podcast's case, it matched very well in that you reflected their purpose. :)

[CappinCanuck]

I almost always choose music selections based on content. In this podcast's case, it matched very well in that you reflected their purpose. :)

Hello IM crew :D. I just wanted to point out, and I'm not sure if anybody else feels the same, that the music segments might be a bit too loud compared to the speech parts? I'm usually playing the cast and immediately need to either run or rush to turn the volume down during the break and or segment change. Not a major issue, but just something since there has never been a time when I wasn't scrambling to turn the volume down on the music because it became too loud for either my ears, when wearing headphones, or my neighbours, when over speakers. I have it pretty loud normally though, so I can hear the discussion well.

Edit: If I'm the only one, I can certainly just run it through some equalizer of sorts. I just thought maybe I wasn't the only one :)

[Voodoo]

Good point out. Thanks Captain! :) I'll be sure to run it through the levelator after the editing is done. I actually need to do this to all prior episodes. I will definitely do it for all episodes going forward though.

[nabokovfan87]

Not entirely sure when it ended (seemed to be right after the discussion had ended), but did anyone else notice the dramatic drop in audio fidelity when the "I'm too old to have time for games" discussion started?

Maybe you all can talk about the recording situation, and instead of recording over Skype perhaps record locally and send the audio files to the editor (I only suggest that because that is how I edit my own podcast, which leads to me having to make sure lag is properly adjusted for)?

Anyways, email off!
-nabokovfan87