Media Recap: September 2012

Posted on Sun 30 September 2012 • Tagged with Media Recap

Games

  • Guild Wars 2
    I played a whole lot more Guild Wars 2 than before since I was procrastinating a little harder.

Podcasts

Hypercritical

  • Hypercritical 83 - Dishonorable
  • Hypercritical 84 - Spared No Expense
  • Hypercritical 85 - Just Check The Checkbox!
  • Hypercritical 86 - Naked Robotic Core
  • Hypercritical 87 - Smarter and Harder

Build & Analyze

  • Build & Analyze 76 - Trust Me, I Know C
  • Build & Analyze 84 - California Knife in Your Back
  • Build & Analyze 93 - One Donkey Walking In A Circle
  • Build & Analyze 94 - Everything Would Cut You
  • Build & Analyze 95 - This Unicorn Doesn’t Support NFC
  • Build & Analyze 96 - Sandwich With A Slot

The Incomparable

  • The Incomparable 86 - Like “Catcher in the Rye,” Except Crappier
    They love the Night Circus. I love the Night Circus. Everyone loves the Night Circus.
  • The Incomparable 108 - Journey: Then We Touched, Then We Sang
    Had to listen in on this one. I adore Journey. I mean, I bought the game even though I don’t have a Playstation 3 myself only to be able to play the game which I’ve tested during GamesCom 2011.

The Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast

  • Secret Archives of the Vatican 91 - Where Next
  • Secret Archives of the Vatican 95 - Music for Travelers

Roundup

  • The Talk Show With John Gruber 13 (iTunes Link) - Unusually Open
    I listened to this mainly due to Michael Lopp (@rands) being the guest.
  • Alternativlos 25 - Cyberwar (mit Gast: FX)
    This German show is done by the wildly known Fefe and during the Cyberwar episode all three speakers had a lot of fun discussing this rather bleak topic. I laughed hard several times and couldn’t have known that it was this amusing. I will definitely check out other episodes of Alternativlos in the future.
  • IRQ Conflict 43 - I Walk Through Life With A Hashtag

Let’s Plays

  • Assassin’s Creed Revelations - The Lost Archives
    As expected the DLC was mostly boring, consisting only of those damned puzzle sections and a whole lot of disturbed, mind-bending un-fantasies. Also as far as I know it has a 10€ price tag and lasts about 2-3 hours which is kind of ridiculous, given that the gameplay sucks.
  • Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
    I wasn’t sure what to expect from the more pulp action oriented not-sequel to Alan Wake since it seemed to have little in common with the original in terms of atmosphere. Watching the LP was fun, though not as much as a true sequel would’ve been. This is more of a ‘what happens in between’ thing than a continuation of Alan Wake’s story.
    That being said I think that time loops make for cheap recycling of assets - a fact that the devs have worked around by making variations and giving the option to skip certain things by being able to know what will be important. Also, mind the radio shows. There’s one episode that’s quite scary which gave me slight chills all the while making me grin in that certain silly way. Too bad I can’t remember whether I found Barry to be as annoying in the original game.
  • Radiant Historia
    I had played this game before, it has some great ideas but the amount of required backtracking and replaying of things due to its time traveling and time altering concepts gets bothersome quickly. I was grateful to see a well done let’s play on this and enjoyed it a lot - since I quit playing about a third into the story. Besides that I used this as a test for mobile Safari’s offline reading list feature in order to read on the train. It worked superbly well.

Videos

Novels

Comics & Manga

Summary: 1 game, 18 podcasts, 3 let’s plays, 1 keynote, 1 novel

Sidenotes

I came across an album by the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing pieces from video game history. It’s incredibly good. I’ve bought several tracks from it and I’m eagerly looking forward to the release of the second album on Nov 6th 2012.