I've posted show number 3 of the Van Hemlock podcast for your (hopefully) entertainment. This time we discuss electing players for the council in Eve, Warhammer being delayed, Blizzard going to court, Shadowbane wiping all their characters and then I'm forced to watch e-Sports at gunpoint before we talk about Fable 2 and what MMOs could maybe learn from the ideas that it hopes to bring to the genre. You can also subscribe to this RSS feed.

Plan for the day: Record podcast, go to the pub for lunch and then edit it in the afternoon. The reality: Record podcast, go to the pub for lunch and then obsess about Burnout Paradise all afternoon and evening until I got my Elite license. So that's it. 100% completion on all single player content. I have every car, I've performed every jump, smash and crash and now Burnout is an online only game for me, but now I get to show off with my gold and platinum paint schemes on my cars. Paradise has been...

It seems that nowadays a lot more people admit to liking the music in Eve than used to back in the day (which is defined as any point before now that suits my argument), which either means less people lie or newer players have better taste! If you don't like ambient or electronica then you're probably not going to like this post. I would say sorry but I'm not. The big problem with the Eve music is that there's just not enough. You can only listen to it for so long before the endless repeating of the same songs gets...

Everything I do seems to break the ability of the blog to send me email. Hopefully it's working again now.

Apparently there's an exhibition at the Science museum in London on the BBC Micro that I should really go see. How this computer came about is an interesting story in itself and the article covers some of the basics, but there's one overriding thing that came out of this very old and underpowered system. Two men called David Braben and Ian Bell decided to write a game that has had me hooked it it's sequels and spiritual successors ever since: Elite. Yeah yeah, everybody knows about it but the BBC keep mentioning it so I'm just spreading the joy! They've...

Most people that I've met in Eve have a favourite ship, and this ship changes over time. My current squeeze is sort of a long term relationship now, my Buzzard. She's seen me through wars, peace and pirates, and I'm (amazingly) still on my first one. The nature of the ship, a covert ops frigate, means that 99% of the time there's anybody bad around I'm invisible and being sneaky. When I'm really bored I'm sitting on pirate or enemy gate camps rating their performance (they love that, it's probably a good way to start wars though!) The thing I...

Arthur C Clark has died. Not a lot I can say really, his influence has been too great to ever truly understand fully (although the coming up with satellites thing was rather useful in the long term). No, he didn't just influence Eve, he influenced all of Sci-Fi as a genre in a massive way. Few people get to have that sort of effect.

Thinking back I don't think I've run an agent mission personally since December so I don't know if it's a common thing at the moment, but over at this blog there's a great screenshot of what happens when an exception gets thrown while figuring out what your agent should say next. Yeah, I know. I'm a developer so I find this kind of thing amusing :)

Producing one show is an experiment. Two shows makes it a podcast and I hear that three makes a wall. Oh, hang on that's bricks in archaeology. Ignore that unless you're digging holes in the ground. We managed to stop playing games for long enough to dig the studio out from the mound of beer cans that signals long evenings in Eve and record some inaccurate ramblings about all things that are good. Van Hemlock has the details. For a podcast that isn't about Eve we sure talk about it a lot.

The game has been out in the states for a few weeks I think, but this week we got the demo for Turning Point: The Fall of Liberty over here in Blighty. If ever there was a first person shooter idea that was perfect it's this one: Word War II goes slightly wrong because Churchill dies in the 30s and Germany invades America. Or, as it's probably better described as, Nazis Take Manhattan. With an idea like that how can you possibly go wrong? It turns out that even with the most awesome idea ever you can still churn out a...

http://www.unlocktheminesofmoria.com/ I can do this news thing. The first Lords of the Rings Online expansion has been announced and we're off to the Mines of Moria. +10 to the level cap, new loot thing with equipment developing alongside characters as they level (please don't say I need to grind for my sword's XP now as well as my character's XP!), Rune Keeper and Warden as new classes. Apparently it's going to be the usual annual expansion schedule, which is good as there's also six (or maybe 5 with the expansion being the 6th) biggish patches per year that...

This weeks patch for even went, well, not as well as they hoped and so thousands found themselves with an evening to spare. Since the best thing to do TV wise on a Wednesday night is to shout at Torchwood ("Stop making comments about having no breath because he's dead all the time if he's going to breath so heavily while it's said!") I decided to spend most of the evening elsewhere. In this case it was Middle Earth. Yes folks, I've been playing Lord of the Rings online. Don't tell anybody but it's quite fun. First impressions of LOTRO...

Would anybody mind if the next podcast has a laughter track? It's too late to get a live audience in for the recording. How about if we do it in the style of the News Quiz? Actually I think that would make a great show idea if more stand up comedians played MMOs. You might be able to tell that I'm bored and the Eve forums are down because they've broken the whole game while patching. I'll go back to research for the podcast then so I know a lot about what we forget to talk about this time.

OK, it was Burnout but it's really depressing going from around 4000th in the world down to 8000th in one evening. To be fair I was concentrating more on getting takedowns instead of winning because of the guys with the F1 cars being so much faster once they get going (must do more offline races and get those cars). You also know you're in trouble when you start a race and most of them have shiny cars, I've got to get my license up that last level if I want to compete, but I've still got 70odd races to go....

I noticed that I have over 50million skill points, and I don't remember passing that milestone. I don't think I'm paying enough attention. Of course the real reason is that I just don't care about the number of skillpoints I have any more, I know that it is just a false number as you effectively only ever have as many skillpoints as you have in the task that you're currently performing. I'm a well skilled pilot in Gallente and Caldari ships, but a lousy Amarr pilot. I'm a pretty good miner (sometimes I can't avoid mining to show willing on...

Yes, as announced by Van Hemlock, we have a podcast that's big on rambling and bad microphone technique. Head over there for the links if you've got an hour to spare to listen to our perfectly informed and researched commentary. Or ignorant ramblings. There are some mentions of Eve, but it's by no means an Eve podcast. Saying that it's the one game that we do both play it's inevitable that I'm always going to be steering the conversation in that direction.