OUR SECOND FINAL EPISODE: After over a month (hell, almost two months), and a lot of discussion and, yes, even one failed attempt, our hosts return! However, they bring with them the news that this episode will be the final regular episode of A Podcast [ , ] For All Intents and Purposes. After eleven years, priorities have changed and, you know, things have changed that caused our hosts to reconsider their priorities and take inventory. It isn’t good-bye, necessarily….
We’re taking a quick minute to take notice that today––March 29th––is the five year anniversary of the show’s first episode. For five years this show has proudly never missed an update. Sure, to accommodate that we created formats like the Shortcast, Guestcast, and even an honest-to-god clip show––but we’ve always brought you weekly audio as your reliable 14th source for nerdy and geeky news and discussion. During this time, we tried out a lot of things––not the least of which…
“The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s Troubled Five-Year Development” by Jason Schreier via Kotaku. Whatever your thoughts may be about BioWare’s Mass Effect: Andromeda, there is no doubt that something happened during its development that lead to such a rocky debut, a series of choices so clouded in the public’s questions and shrouded in the mystery a company like EA’s BioWare can afford, the game was otherwise assumed to be relegated to the “well, that happened” category of games and…
WEEK IN GEEK: Andrew listens to an academic argument about free to play games and, inspired by it, plays Marvel Avengers Academy while Dan plays through Episode 2 of Batman: The Telltale Series and still can’t believe how awesome Bruce Wayne is. #CYCLOPSWASRIGHT: Bringing back resident Marvel expert, Elijah Kaine, the trio talk about Marvel and how it uses crossovers both in the narrative sense and in the business sense. They discuss everything from the thematic base of Civil War to prognosticating about the…
“Independence in Modern Pop Culture” by Jake Frankenfield via Comicsverse While not about a particular aspect of nerd culture, Frankenfield’s article finds a thread strung through most aspects of geekdom: a legitimate choice between independent and “mainstream” products. In most nerdy and geeky venues, these exist side-by-side––I think of the gaming scene (specifically video gaming; Andrew will have to answer for the tabletop angle) where venues as amalgamated as Steam as well as the more hierarchical PSN or XBox Live give independent products…
“The End of Endings: Modern Videogames and the Code for Infinite Time” by Lewis Beard via Paste I remember having a semantic debate with Andrew back in high school regarding the correct phraseology to use when discussing the completion of a video game’s content. Basically it came down to two choices: did I beat the game or had I won the game? This was back in the nineties when declaring a victor in order to make discussion about games as clear as possible mattered,…
“Guns, Games and Violence: The Real Questions You Should Be Asking” by Brian Crecente via Polygon. As a writing teacher, the research-based portion of my scaffolding tends to always yield at least a few “Do video games contribute to youth violence?” proposals every semester. Honestly, it’s a tired debate but not because of the questions being asked, but for how little conversation actually happens. Lately, the pattern seems to be that when a new study is published that either states that games…
This week D. Bethel brings on Elijah Kaine to talk about the X-Men in anticipation of this week’s release of X-Men: Apocalypse. They discuss not only the filmic franchise but also of the themes of the X-Men in general and how they fit in with the greater Marvel universe. Read Elijah’s writing at the Geek Intellectualist. Check out his gaming streams at twitch.tv/wthhero. Leave a comment on the topic(s) discussed this week at forall.libsyn.com. Be sure to join the official Facebook…