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Sunday, April 26, 2009

What I've Been Listening To: April 19-25, 2009

Sometimes listening to podcasts comes in handy. At work this week, the programmer who introduced me to World of Warcraft told me he let his account expire because he was going back to City of Heroes. I immediately knew from listening to podcasts like Van Hemlock #47, Virgin Worlds #143 and Massively Speaking #49 that he was interested in the mission architect feature. Maybe I just work in the right place, but we have a lot of people at work who play MMORPGs (mostly WoW) and it's nice to be able to talk about games with everyone.

Here is what I've listened to over the past week.

Virgin Worlds #143 (Host: Brent) - Brent is back with a 30 minute podcast after last episode's marathon coverage of the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Brent talks about the City of Heroes mission architect, Love, more moves at Linden Labs, StarGate Worlds, the Eve Online expansion, Fallen Earth's upcoming rating, World of Warcraft in China, Paragon Games, and more. If you can't listen to a lot of podcasts but want to keep up with the news, this is a good one to listen to.

Van Hemlock #48 (Hosts: Tim Dale and Jon Shute) - Episode #48 found our intrepid podcasters talking about the upcoming closure of Shadowbane, upgrades in the U.K.'s internet infrastructure, another news outlet shutting down its Second Life bureau and more Jack Thompson news. In talking about Shadowbane, Jon came up with the term "PvP tourist" to describe one of the possible reasons for the games closure.

For the every-other-show topic, the hosts discussed regional servers and why regional servers are needed in on-line games. The discussion delves deeper into the subject than ping times and probably will introduce American listeners to topics that those in the European Union take for granted.

The twitter question of the week was about seasonal holiday's in games and which ones are the best.

Massively Speaking #49 (Host: Shawn Schuester) - Kyle Horner makes his second appearance on Massively Speaking. Shawn and Kyle discuss the MMO market in China, Darkfall, D&D Online, Fallen Earth, and the City of Heroes mission architect. Kyle was extremely excited about using the mission architect and if it is everything Kyle says, may keep CoH/CoV a viable game in the face of the upcoming games like Champions Online and DC Universe.

The Instance #142 (Hosts: Scott Johnson & Randy Jordan) - Would you believe the dog ate my notes? Okay, I was tired and just sat back on the train and listened to the premier World of Warcraft on the Interwebs. I do remember a discussion about Patch 3.1 and how Curse and WoWInterface are fighting back against WoWMatrix. Oh, and did I forget to mention that Turpster was on? Please guys, let's just call them fanny packs. The conversation was definitely not workplace safe.

Epic Dolls #64 (Hosts: Leala Turkey and Katerina) - Leala and Kat give their take on WoW's Patch 3.1 and I discovered that, among other things, planning raids for the first two days after the patch went live was not a good idea. The pair answered listener mail about fashion and fishing before Leala began a discussion about a blog post by Ralph Kostner about the way people play games. In episodes 62 & 63 Leala and Kat's discussion about WoW guilds transcended the game. In this episode the Dolls show they can discuss general concepts and relate them to WoW.

EQ2's-day broadcast from April 14 (Hosts: Dellmon and Zanadi) - Once again Dellmon titles a show "Death and Taxes" just because the broadcast day falls around the time everyone's taxes are due in the U.S. Besides talking about how death and taxes are implemented in EverQuest 2, the pair discuss the Lavastorm revamp.

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