Everybody's Talking At Once

ETAO Podcast, Episode 43. ARMS got announced with the Switch, and it launched with the Switch, and it’s been both passionately loved and broadly ignored. Lucio was late to the Switch party, and thus late to the ARMS party, but he’s been pretty taken with the game. We’ve played together a bunch, and had about … Continue reading "This Is a Call (Back) to ARMS"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 42. Headliner: NoviNews puts you in the shoes of he/she/xe who curates the news in a country that is rapidly going strange, and just as rapidly becoming politically unstable. It’s a game about information as a tool, news as a product, and ideology as a career. We talk about the process of … Continue reading "Be a Part of the World You’re Changing, with Jakub Kasztalski"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 41. Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux (collectively known as Almost A Game) stop by for a Halloween-as-hell chat about their whimsical tabletop skulduggery simulator, Wicked Apples. We talk about the unique joys of tabletop games—and of digital game, for that matter, and about translating each to the other. We also discuss the … Continue reading "Something Wicked This Way Apples, with Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 40. Henrik Pettersson introduces us to The Gardens Between, a wordless narrative puzzle game in which you play as time itself. We talk about themes surrounding memory, the quest to make complicated games simple (and vice-versa), the seemingly-ever-in-progress indiepocolypse, and a few untranslatable Swedish words. Oh, and SPOILERS for Persona 5 from … Continue reading "The Persistence of (Stories about) Memory, with Henrik Pettersson"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 39. Greg Lobanov swings by to walk about Wandersong, with its happy-go-lucky approach to world-in-the-balance storytelling, its massive 110-tune soundtrack, and its uncommonly rich soundscapes. We talk about the collaborate process that brought the game to life, the thinking behind a music-driven game, and how our emotional connections to games—both in the … Continue reading "Let’s Be Bards, with Greg Lobanov"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 38. Josie Brechner (a.k.a. Visager) talks about her OST work in EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER, Blossom Tales, Spice of Life, Gay Monster Kiss Club, and my electric heart, not to mention her other music, including the Songs for Unmade Worlds series. She makes wonderful music, for games both real and imagined (as well … Continue reading "This Is MEATPUNK and I’m Telling Everyone, with Josie Brechner (a.k.a. Visager)"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 37. Max Arocena (a.k.a. Colorfiction) hangs out on his porch, amid a rising squall of crickets, to discuss 0°N 0°W (a.k.a. Zero North Zero West), his carefully crafted new dream-’em-up. We discuss the rich possibilities of games without gameplay as such, the incomparable surreality of roadtrips, and the odd connections between working … Continue reading "Singing Dunes and Wandering Creatures, with Max Arocena"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 36. Zach Barth is back to talk about EXAPUNKS, and the cyber-lanche (always create new hyphenate words, in accordance with the WIRED style guide) of questions that the game raises: Do we miss something by wringing our hands about privacy when what’s really at stake in an increasingly computerized world is agency? … Continue reading "REPL PUNK, with Zach Barth"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 35. Kenny Lee is the less-frequently-interviewed half of the two-brother team that founded Cellar Door Games, the studio behind (most famously) Rogue Legacy and (most recently) Full Metal Furies. He’s also a fan of Ganbare Goemon and Mischief Makers and therefore a megaconnoisseur and the greatest game scholar of our age—so people … Continue reading "Co-Op Hath Four Furies, with Kenny Lee"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 34. Zach Barth is back to talk about Opus Magnum and SHENZHEN I/O, the latest in each of Zachtronics’ semi-distinct trademark genres: games where you make things that makes things, and games where you actually code or script, respectively. We talk about how these two parallel tracks came to be, where their … Continue reading "You Can Feel Great All The Time Solving Problems, with Zach Barth"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 33. Joel Corelitz drops in to discuss his work on GOROGOA, TumbleSeed, The Unfinished Swan, and Eastward, along with the broader design philosophies behind those games. Even more broadly than that, we talk about the layers of audience engagement in music, in games, and especially in music in games—not to mention the … Continue reading "Thumbprints and Thunder, with Joel Corelitz"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 32. Garry Schyman scored all three Bioshocks, all three Destroy All Humans games, Resistance: Retribution, Front Mission Evolved, and that oddly engrossing God of War clone based on Dante’s Inferno— and that’s just scratching the surface of his video game music, to say nothing of his enormous body of work for film … Continue reading "On Orcs and Orchestras, with Garry Schyman"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 31. Greg Kasavin stops by to discuss Supergiant’s latest, the party-based purgatory-escape-’em-up Pyre. We also find some time to discuss Bastion and Transistor, not to mention the limits of “naked allegory,” the largely untapped potential of diegetic Game Over states—and more generally, of game designs that allow for and accommodate failure—and the … Continue reading "Pyre, Purgatories, Prison Dramas, and Talking Dogs, with Greg Kasavin"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 30. Medievalist, archnerd, and outspoken Persona-enjoyer Adam Osborn returns to discuss Persona 5—as well as visual novels, waifus, and Pope Joan, though not always at the same time and not necessarily in that order. Thrill as we trip over each other trying to remark on everything remarkable about this mad JRPG opus. … Continue reading "Persona 5 and the Punk of Pope Joan, with Adam Osborn"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 29. Drew’s good buddy Adam Osborn, PhD-pursuer and self-described archnerd, stops by the discuss the Persona games in anticipation of Persona 5 finally coming out next week (but no, really for real this time). Starting at the 01:08:24 mark, I should mention, this one does get a TRIGGER WARNING for suicide ideation, … Continue reading "A Seminar (Just Bearly) on Persona 3 and 4, with Adam Osborn"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 28. Last week, Richard Terrell outlined his framework for taxonomizing and evaluating game criticism, and we spent some time using that framework to disagree vociferously about whether Arin Hanson is any damn good at talking about Zelda. This week we get into the weeds about the Zeldas themselves, and here’s the crux … Continue reading "Criticizing Videogame Critique, Part 2, with Richard Terrell"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 27. Richard Terrell returns to talk about Design Oriented, his attempt to categorize, catalog, and (here’s where things get interesting) rate game critique. What’s being measured there, and how is he measuring it, and to what end? Last time, we talked about what games are, what art is, and why he considers … Continue reading "Criticizing Videogame Critique, Part 1, with Richard Terrell"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 26. Following on our bummer of a conversation about the most joyful show on television, this week we have an exuberant and hopeful conversation about a series of games focused on violence, failure, and ends of days. Go figure. Yes, it’s time to discuss Dark Souls, and the fandoms attendant thereto. This … Continue reading "The Dark Souls of Increasingly Unhelpful Analogies"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 25. Lucio and I are both fans of Steven Universe, but we’re not exactly members of the Steven Universe fandom—or fandoms, plural, each with its own social norms, its own orthodoxies about what the series means, and its own articles of faith about where the story is headed. The people most conspicuously … Continue reading "Gem Fusions and Fandom Fissions in the Universe of Steven Universe"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 24. Dan Teasdale returns to discuss No Goblin’s sophomore effort, 100ft Robot Golf, a game about (wait for it) hundred-foot-high robots playing golf. This being a No Goblin game, of course, there’s more to it than that. It’s a deeply personal and proudly goofy admixture of influences that maybe shouldn’t even be … Continue reading "Virtual Realities and Pretend Robots, with Dan Teasdale (and Cassie)"