Bleep, Bleep. Bloop, Bloop. Video Games. 12-06/12-09

For the week of December 06 – 12: Let’s talk Game Club.

---

With all the quality releases hitting the shelves lately, I expect you’re all playing the latest and greatest, but my question for you this week has to do with whether or not you’ve done your homework?

Anyone who plays games has that pile of half finished or barely touched titles that at one point were cutting edge. Over the years, they might have dulled a bit, but that doesn’t make them any less of the game you were so excited to pick up back when it was new. So what I’ve been doing lately is playing through that big ol’ pile of games that deserved more attention than I was able to provide at the time.

That’s also when I thought, ‘Hey, this would be the perfect time to join the Game Club’, Rebel FM’s monthly podcast for games that fall directly into the category I was just describing. Basically it’s Oprah’s Book Club for games and the perfect excuse to finally finish Half-Life 2 + Episodes 1 & 2.

Due to my spotty history with pc games, I never actually got to Highway 17, because my videocard drivers refused to load it. And after hunting for new drivers and learning all about nVidia’s support for laptop drivers and downloading and installing a special hacked laptop version, I played through to the same point and wouldn’t you know, it wouldn’t load. Then I remembered why I don’t bother with PC games. Life’s too short to be scouring message boards for the special driver for some game.

But now that I found The Orange Box for $15, what excuse did I have left?

I’m surprised with how motivating the whole Game Club thing has been. Play a couple hours in the evening, then the next day listen to discussion about what you’ve played through. With a game like Half-Life 2, the story and design of the game is so deep that after listening to the podcast, I learned how much of the game I hadn’t seen or frankly thought about. Specifically G-Man sightings, why the developers designed the environments a certain way, what things could have been based on peripheral readings and finer points of the story and characters.

Back when the Game Club was a 1up.com podcast, I remember listening through Indigo Prophecy and Psychonaughts and the game creators actually joined in on the last episode to discuss the game along with them. Now that the Game Club is on Rebel FM, I’m having troubles tracking those older podcasts down, but that’s not going stop me from looking further.

After seeing how much more I was able to gleem from a game, I pretty sure this is my new preffered way to experience a game. I’d love it if there were more of these Game Club style podcasts available for all of my games. Whether they come directly from those involved with the games creation (if they can speak candidly about it) or from a third party group of gamers.

Has anybody else participated in this style of playing games? What games would you like to have run through the Game Club spinner?

Until next week.

Dale can also be found over at www.8bitcyclops.com, looking at design, photography and old video game magazines.