The Podcast of Excess...

Another fortnight, another two hours of formless rambling into microphones. For reasons which will become increasingly apparent as you listen, I've become somewhat slack on the actual blogging of late, and do apologise. Hopefully, Drastic Action over the next week or so will mean service resumed as usual. Either that, or I'll just go mad; whichever!

Van Hemlock Overdrive!; Ep 9; In which various forms of Excess are poked with the pointy stick of Amateur Psychiatry, an Epic What We are Playing section utterly crushes any kind of News Section, Excessive Download Gluttony is threatened with rationing so we Do Maths On Air, and your host gets all Emo and Introspective about Very Trivial Matters Indeed!

Relevant Linkage:

Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog: Internet Data Caps... omg

And, er, that's about it!

You can offer hugs, or just tell me that all I need is a kick up the arse and a good spell in the army below, or over at our Gax Online Group!

Feedback

# re: The Podcast of Excess...

The length of the What We Are Playing segment was completely justified by its content. Less AoC, more EVE IMO. Still my favorite podcast! 6/23/2008 9:28 PM | Adam Tiler

# re: The Podcast of Excess...

No such thing as too much Van Hemlock, my dear.
6/23/2008 9:42 PM | Mynxee

# re: The Podcast of Excess...

I wonder if your Nifty! feature is perhaps symptomatic of this need to have multiple MMOs on the go, to dip-in to various games. Is it because in the EQ days there were very few others games to compare features with, and therefore EQ was fulfilling on its own? Nowadays there are such a huge variety of MMO games out there, each trying to do things in a slightly different way - we all complain about the fact that they're all still Diku MUDs (see Bartle's recent comment that he's already played WAR, it's called WoW - but outside of the generic formula of that intrinsic MMOness, there are features, locales and nuances that make each game interesting in its own right. Are we perhaps, as MMO-hoppers, trying to sample the unique and interesting design elements and settings of these games inside the comfortably familiar generic Diku framework of the levelling grind? I know that I like the combat in Age of Conan; the sense of place and purpose in WoW; the atmosphere of Guild Wars and also its customisable and collectible skills; the character creation potential and arcade game-play of City of Heroes; the setting and races of Dark Age of Camelot. I like all these and more, and the only way to experience them at the moment is to play the game that they are specific to, and because they are all based around the same fundamental framework, I can jump between them without having to 'unlearn what I have learned'.

Anyway, there's definitely some Nifty! to Age of Conan, even if it isn't the revolution that people were perhaps hoping for. So if you do decide to become an MMO Monk, retire to a monastery on a far away Tibetan mountain in order to follow The Path of the Peripatetic Player, and pick-up AoC as a seventh MMO, give us a shout: I’ve always wanted to be a monk, hmm, guess I’ll head back to Guild Wars for a bit instead!

Or maybe EQII, they have monks to try too... 6/24/2008 9:44 AM | Melmoth

# re: The Podcast of Excess...

The Paul Barnett interview over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun seems pretty apt:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1985

"... [players] start off with that idle wonder, and end up with everything not being any good, and everything being better in the good old days." 6/25/2008 8:51 AM | Zoso

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