The podcast I produce about arcade and retro video games is finalist in the Irish Web Awards

And as it’s International Podcast Day I’ve just uploaded a brand new podcast about growing up gaming in Ireland in the 80s and 90s.

You can listen to it here:

The radio station I’m involved with, Near FM, is currently celebrating 20 years of broadcasting and I put together a little post over there highlighting some of the content that is available on it’s podcast page. I introduced podcasting to the radio station back in 2005 so it was the first radio station in Ireland to have a podcast section.
Amusingly I was one of the first voices on Near FM back in 1995 where I presented a computer show called ‘The Binary Zone’. Odd that here I am 20 years later still talking about the same old games that were brand new back then.

A new Arcade and Retro podast went up last week.

In this one myself, Sera and Stephen discuss the Mother series of games, known as Earthbound outside of Japan.

We also talk about Satoru Iwata, who died tragically recently, and how instrumental he was in the development of Mother 2 and the important roll he played in Nintendo and gaming in general.

I recently got things set up at home so that I can capture footage off some of my older consoles like the Famicom here. So I did a little ‘Let’s Play’ video of Treasure Island Dizzy, a game I mostly remember from playing on the C64 and the Amiga as a kid. The NES version seems a lot closer to the Amiga version. Both being considerably easier than the C64 version.

I had a few friends over for a retro video game party last weekend and we decided to livestream some games.

Unfortunately we’re still working out a way to stream older systems, but fortunately the Wii U is backwards compatible and has a HDMI video output which is easy for us to stream. We played a game called ‘Escape From Bug Island’ from 2006 which we had a lot of fun with. There’s some amazing dialogue in this game.

I had a little retro video game party over the weekend. My appartment isn’t super big but I think I made effective use of the space.  Brian who I’ve previously recorded some ‘Let’s Plays’ with was over and had all his equipment with him from streaming a fighting game tournament earlier in the day so we set up a live stream on the night and played some old games. The 1st is Harvester, a point and click adventure game that I have absolutely no memory of purchasing and knew zero about it. Then we tried some Omikron: The Nomad Soul an early David Cage game. He’s the guy who brought us games such as Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain. Omikron is notable for staring David Bowie.

You can see an archive of the livestream below. It was more of a test to see if we could do it, so hopefully we’ll try again soon with something a bit more planned.

I’ve recently tried my hand at producing some retro video game ‘Let’s Plays’ as an extension of my arcadeandretro.com podcasts. With the help of Brian who is well known for his videos for the Irish fighting game community we recorded some footage from several games over an afternoon during the holiday period.

Let’s Plays are recordings of someone playing a video game and offering a subjective commentary on their experience. They’re  oddly compelling to watch. This is probably down to the fact that video games made up a major part of my youth (and are still a big part of my life) but very little content was on television, which is still a big problem to this day. But thanks to video streaming on the internet people are able to access a huge amount of content for a subject matter that is vastly popular that we’re largely deprived of with traditional broadcasters.

In a later post I’ll do up a list of some of the YouTube producers who produce content that I particularly enjoy, but for now feel free to have a look at my own ‘Let’s Play’ of Ninja Kids, an excellent side scrolling beat-em-up from Taito that was released in 1989. It’s a little rough and tumble as we were trying to get a few technical problems ironed out. But I have some ideas for future ones that I think should prove fun and we can only improve!