As I mentioned recently, A More Civlized Age has pivoted to covering Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 in order to remain compliant with the BDS movement in a way that aligns with their morals and ethics as a group. Which means this is the first video game I’m going to play for more than a few hours since I started playing Final Fantasy 14 back at the start of the year (literally January 1st). Furthermore, the group has released their mod list (which seems to have been put together by Austin Walker, the only person in the crew to have previously played this game), so I’ll also be spending a decent amount of time (an hour or two at most, I’m sure), setting up my own mods. While their coverage of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a lot of fun to listen to, AMCA has mentioned that multiple people in their fan/Patreon community had a difficult time following along with the podcast if they weren’t playing the game. Which makes sense. While they cover a lot of the details of the game, lacking the accompanying visuals and all of the pieces that go between what they directly mentioned in the podcast would make it difficult to really get a sense of the game being played. This time around, Austin is playing ahead to hopefully steer the group toward a better structure for the show as a whole by figuring out where good stopping points are via his own play rather than trying to guess at them based on his recollections of having played the games in the past (which didn’t work out the best in their KotOR coverage for a lot of reasons but I bet that some of the planets being of very different lengths and levels of involvement didn’t help much). Additionally, Austin’s also recording his playthroughs and posting an edited version of them as a let’s play, skipping over the boring or repetitive bits (or the bits where he looks stuff up for six minutes), which he’s posting to their YouTube channel the week before each new episode releases. Between these two changes, I think AMCA should have the game pretty well covered even for their listeners who haven’t already played it or aren’t currently replaying it in parallel.
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Friends At The Table Has Another New (And Delightful) Podcast: Side Story!
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.”
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