Cheating: Featuring The Most Popular Girls on the Internet.

This week we take a look at cheating in games throughout the ages; from early button codes, to cheat cartridges all the way through to contemporary, disreputable multiplayer game exploits.

Who better to discuss this highly suspect behaviour, that virtually every one of us has dallied with, or at least encountered in some form over the years than Tara and Sassy, hosts of The Most Popular Girls on the Internet Podcast.

We reveal our fondest memories and worst experiences and cover a wide range of different ways of cheating, assessing how that impacts on the players of games and what might be in store for the medium in the near future.

If you'd like to hear more gadgets, games and social-networking banter from Tara and Sassy then check out their weekly show.

http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=81065

True Achievements

This week we welcome Rich Stone, founder of www.trueachievements.com

For the uninitiated it's a site that takes the 1000 point achievements of every existing Xbox 360 game and through the use of a clever metric and analasys of the achievements of its many thousand members works out what that achievement is really worth.

In other words you deserve more than just 15 points for finishing Story mode on Beatles Rock Band in less than a da. Using True Achievements you get 21 points. Find out why and how at the start of this show. 

After that, for the main body of the show, we discuss with Rich the subject of Trophies and Achievements in general. We've got a lot of feedback from our forums on this and a lot of your opinions get voiced. Clearly they effect how many people play games now, so we explore that. If you don't give a monkeys about achievements... well that gets voiced too.

Many many thanks to Rich for coming on the show and especially for donating £100 to our Doctors Without Borders charity gamerscore marathon. You can still donate for a little longer.

 

 

 

 

Charity Gaming Marathon.

This is an account of what happened last weekend. Tony and I spent a whole day trying to get as many points as possible on a single new Xbox account. The aim was 5000. In return our community made donations to Medecins Sans Frontieres; an independent aid organization currently saving lives in Haiti and Chile.

What you have here is the 54-minute version of that whole day. I found that the best way to contextualise it was to edit together the sound clips with occasional narration in the style of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's definitely not your average podcast.

From the moment we bagen, we had a chatroom open with a webcam broadcasting our progress to our community. You guys were there for us round the clock, even during the desolate early hours of Sunday morning. We'd like to thank all who kept our spirits us and supported this endevour. Also our deep gratitude goes out to all who donated.

Thanks to Paul, Lizz, Jeremy, Sassy, Finlay, Steve, Linda, Carolyn, Tim, Bowlby, Superslug, Ted, Joe, McFluffin, Edie, Brandon, James, Chris and Kelly Brown (Especially Chris who does a guest spot in this very show) Dukebox, My barber, Malcolm, Sam, Gareth, Phil, Jeff, Mike, Dean, Quizzical Demon, UGN, Bernard, Gary, John, Sinan, Michael, Elmo and everyone else.

And of course MASSIVE thanks to Giles who arranged this whole thing with us and donated £750.

 

NOTE: This is the corrected third edit of the show. Apologies if you got the earlier one.

Originality.

Having just finished the deeply derivitive Darksiders and the unequal sequel; Bioshock 2, Tony and I examine how important originality is in games, how it affects sales and after four decades of design, is there really anything genuinely novel in this medium.

Also in our sights; Aliens VS. Predator; Testement to incredible sales despite zero progression in a massively changing decade.

As you listen to this, if it's the weekend; Tony and I will be undertaking our 24-Hour gamer-points charity marathon; One Day Not Wasted, in aid of Doctors Without Borders, currently giving aid in Haiti.

You can follow us all day and night on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/Digitalcowboys

The main forum page is: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/forum/index.php?topic=486.0

And the all-important donations page is here: http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge

Many thanks to all who have donated so generously already. We've made over £300 and we hope to make £2000 and a hefty 5000 gamerscore. The Xbox Live gamertag to watch is DigitalC0wboys

DC Community Room 101.

Room 101 is a metaphorical fiery pit of a place, into which we banish our pet hates. It derives from the George Orwell book 1984 and the British TV series where celebrities campaign to throw their bugbears in against a presenter playing devil's advocate and trying their best to defend the reprehensible.

We've had three of these kind of episodes so far. In episodes 11, 67 and 114. This time we're giving our community a shot. This episode we have ten members of our listenership, all vying to cast their personal gaming demons into the flames.

Thank you so much to all those involved: SeijinAxeman, KidSamson, Superslug, Roy42, Jazeejeff, Combine Hunter, Mijmeister, Finlay666, Savory and Nerdleader.

The Big Wii Debate.

This week we have a roundtable cross-podcast discussion about the Nintendo Wii. Why don't we play it more often? Is it just because of the graphics? Can the list of games that Wii lovers hold dear turn the tide with the rest of us? Five men, five opinions.

Gamerdork's Leon Ratso Albion Cox

The Gamerscene's Dits Symeou

Big Red Potion's Sinan Kubba

And myself and my co-host; Tony Atkins.

Game on.

Selling Just Cause 2.

This week we're very proud to welcome back to the show; Comunity Manager for Eidos, now a label of Square Enix, to talk about Just Cause 2. I had the privelege of getting some hands-on time with the game last week in London and it's looking pretty exciting.

With the game effectively wrapped and release less than two months away, Mike is here to discuss some of the changes that have occurred since the first one, the bits we can look forward to the most and most importantly the challenge of bringing awareness about it to potential audiences in a crowded Q1, 2010.

After that, we discuss our 24 hour charity gaming marathon, which is happening on Saturday the 20th through Sunday the 21st of February and how you, our community can help us.

We finish up with a spoiler-free discussion about Mass Effect 2 and how the gaming mechanics have changed since the stellar original.

You can find the official website with all you need to know about Just Cause 2 here: http://www.justcause.com/home There's also a competition on this episode to win a Just Cause 2 T-Shirt and a rare promotional ID card connected with the Alternate Reality Game on the official website.

And the page to go to, to donate to our Haiti fund is here: http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge

 

 

 

Why Don't Square Remake FFVII?

Having just completed FFXII, restarted VII and in anticipation of FFXIII we decided to pose the question to our community as to why Square Enix don't cash in and make a contemporary version of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most beloved JRPG's of all time for current gen systems.

To help us tackle your responses we brought in Carolyn Sonnek of Pink Ninja productions and Snark Fu. You may also know Carolyn as Blogkitten and the better half of Commander Tim.

Carolyn lives and breathes JRPG's. When she bumps her knee, hit points come off her. So we delve into her mind and ask why she has so much time for this most life-consuming of all gaming genre's.We also examine our own relationship with RPG's both Eastern and Western.

Many thanks to all the listeners who contributed. We did not have time to cram in all of your responses, but we hope we did you justice.

 

A Question of Morality.

We've brought in Daniel Floyd once again, this time to discuss the topic of his latest animated lecture, based on an article by James Portnow on the challenge of designing games with ambiguous moral choice.

The situation so far has been Renegade/Paragon; being a total arsehole or a goody two-shoes and somewhere in-between an under-powered and frustrated player of games trying hard to make decisions that seem realistic. Portnow's article argues that it's possible to achieve more and in this episode, we look at the supreme design challenge that this represents. We also assess the difference between problems in a game and choices and how rarely the latter ever show up.

Many thanks to Daniel for joining us and adding his usual brand of classiness and incisiveness and also to Mr Portnow for the inspirational article. More people like these please.

Stay tuned at the close of the show for a fantastic Tim Minchin song and a cherry on top.

Live Twittercast.

This evening we decided to open up the floor to our community and let you guys pick our topics. Edie Sellers of Gamehounds joins us to field your questions on Twitter and the forums.

We cram into 100 minutes all of your questions about what's coming up in 2010 including Natal and the Sony Gem, 3D technology, Final Fantasy XIII, God of War III, new handhelds and many many more.