Once again, I am here to tell you about a brand new Friends at the Table podcast! I’ve written about Friends at the Table as a whole, with a focus on their tabletop gaming, and the second podcast they started in 2024, Media Club Plus, as it covers the 2011 anime Hunter x Hunter, but they just started somethig brand new a couple weeks ago (episode two came out the week this was posted). It’s a video game discussion podcast called “Side Story” and it is exactly what it sounds like. Austin Walker, noted video game journalist of quite a few places (perhaps most notably Waypoint back in the day), has apparently been getting requests from people for years to go back to talking about video games the way he used to before the career change that brought him to the now-closed Possibility Space video game studio. Now that he’s choosing to focus his time and energy on Friends at the Table, rather than continuing to keep it as a side project, he’s started this video game discussion podcast with a cast made up of other Friend at the Table folks. So far, he’s only had two other people join him for both of the podcast’s first two episodes (Jack de Quidt and Janine Hawkins, both people who have written for video games in the past), but Austin has been clear that he intends to have the rest of the Friends at the Table cast on at some point. Given that the whole premise of this particular video game podcast is to just talk about the games they have been playing, rather than seeking to provide stringent reviews or high-concept disucssions, it’s perfect for someone looking for a relaxing discussion of video games of all types (recent, older, indie, big-budget, etc) that ranges from the light “this was fun” to the critical “I played this but found the experience strange and possibly unpleasant” and even the hopeful “this game is promising a lot and seems to be actually delivering during its early access phase.”
Continue readingPodcast
Choosing Joy While Listening To NADDPod
One of the podcasts I listen to regularly, NADDPod (AKA, Not Another D&D Podcast), recently started their fourth season (or main campaign, I guess? Though they have talked about changing up the format to do fewer long campaigns and more shorter ones, which really kind of muddies the waters). After all these years of games–main campaigns, side games, mini-arcs, and one-shots–the final member of the group has taken the lead and run not just a one-shot or a mini-arc like most of the others have, but stepped up to run the next main campaign for group. The one guy in the group who hasn’t technically sworn to never run a campaign but has expressed extreme trepidation about it and about not knowing the game well enough to run things has finally stepped out from behind the character sheet and taken a seat behind the GM’s screen. This guy, Jake Herwitz, has always been funny and a great performer (and is, in fact, one of the original founders of the podcast company that NADDPod is a part of), but I was a bit nervous at the thought of him taking over. After all, I hadn’t really seen any of his independent creative work, or anything he’d done outside of the podcast. I had no idea what it was that he would bring to the show that the others didn’t do just as well if not better. Having listened to a few episodes, though, I am happy to say that all of my fears were completely wrong and he’s doing a better job than I ever imagined he could. He might even wind up being my favorite GM for this group, in fact, if he manages to stay the course for his entire run.
Continue reading