Couch Podtatoes

This week I'm joined by a very special guest. One of my best friends and the first official guest that I've had on the show that I actually know in real life, Jasinner, joins me for a discussion on Retro. Retro gaming, collecting, and what all goes into it. Jasinner is a retro game collector, and has nearly all of the original NES games on their original cartridges, along with tons of other cool stuff. We touch on other facets of collecting as well, along with making pop culture references along the way. It was a fun and candid conversation I'm sure you'll enjoy!

Welcome back to the show everyone! This week, Izzy's been playing the hell out of No Man's Sky, and Eri has been knee deep in Starbound, both of which are exploration focused games. We dive into what makes up a game that is exploration focused, what the strengths and weakness are, and how they might improve in the future. As usual we touch on many different titles, systems and mechanics and weave in our signature potty-mouthed humor. Come on a journey with us!

Hey guys and gals! Sorry I'm late pushing this episode out, real life (and No Man's Sky) have been kicking my ass lately when it comes to having any free time! Eri and I have super conflicting schedules lately so I apologize for that. We're getting together in a couple days to put together another episode though, so no harm no foul right? So this week I go it alone, and I'm talking about a recent esports scandal, the way League of Legends' relegation system works, and how that could be applied to other professional sports. So yeah, if you aren't into those types of things, you probably won't be really interested in this discussion, but it's only 20 minutes, so maybe you'll be surprised. I don't know. Either way, I thought it was a thought provoking topic and would love some feedback on it!

This week it's just me at Tacktix, and we're diving into a rather deep topic about the Cultural shifts of the world. This may end up turning into an ongoing series, as we felt that there was far too much to cover in just one episode, so this particular show talks about gaming going mainstream and being super popular. The gaming sphere has seen cultural changes, and it has become so mainstream to effect the culture of the world. Our global Internet culture is a huge phenomenon, and we want to cover multiple angles of this. For now, it's all about gaming, but there will be more to come, so stay tuned!

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Couch Podtatoes. This week we're running another Hot Podtatoe Headlines show, in which we gather some interesting tidbits from around the interwebs to share with you. We talk about some new games, hardware, Pokemon Go, and even cover some Idiots on the Internet, in our typical fashion. That's really all there is to it, so have a listen and enjoy! We'll see you in a week!

We're back at it again, this time we're joined one more time by Tacktix, and we're covering a new issue that plagues the gaming industry. Well, it's not really a plague, that just sounded good. We talk about regions, regional servers, language barriers, cultural differences, and the global gaming community. It's a shorter discussion because we only had so many points to make, but overall we agree that the global gaming community is a fantastic thing and helps bring mankind one step closer to starship federations and world peace. Or something like that. Anyway, enjoy the show, and we'll see you in a week!

Here's the continuation of our recap discussion from last week. We round off the show with discussion of the latter episodes (or newer ones, depending on how you want to look at it). There isn't really much else to say about it. At this point, we're basically caught up after having missed a bit of time. We do have a show recorded that will be released this upcoming weekend as well, so you're getting quite a bit of content in a short amount of time. Don't get used to it! :P

Wow, we've been gone for a little while! Apologies, we had scheduling issues and busy lives got in the way! But we're back, and we have a load of content for you that will be released in the coming week. Starting today though, we're diving into our two year anniversary celebration! We decided to do a recap of some of our best episodes and update you all with our current thoughts and opinions on those topics. In some cases our minds have changed, in others they've stayed the same, but we regret nothing! We hope that you'll enjoy joining us in this celebration of what feels like a very long run in the podcast world. Because we were recapping nearly one hundred episodes, this celebration had to be split into two parts, so you can expect part two to be released by mid-next-week. We've also already recorded a new show to be released next weekend, so we should be basically caught up from our content drought. Enjoy!

Those of you who have been paying attention will probably have heard the scuttlebutt about the whole Link gender swapping issue that arose over the past week. I wrote a post about it myself, as did Eri and other members of the community. Later, it was clear that though the discussion was a good one, it was stretched out over so many different websites that we should probably combine all of the thoughts into a podcast. I ran a poll, our fans voted and we ended up rolling with it. So we talk about gender swapping of Link and other iconic characters, in video games, movies, and comic books. Later we also relate the same sort of ideas toward the changing of ethnicities as well. I'm pretty sure there's some dick jokes in there as well, but that's nothing new. We ended the debate 1-1, so I guess we'll have to run another round the next time there's a hotbutton issue that me and Eri at least partially disagree on. Enjoy the rant. We'll be back in a week.

E3 2016 is here, and as is tradition here on Couch Podatoes, we're talking all about it and getting hyped for the next big things in video games! Just like the past two years, we're talking about the games we're most excited about, and gushing over what we're hoping to see more of. Prior to recording this show the Electronic Arts conference was streamed live from Twitch, and we start off the show by talking about what we saw during that presentation. Afterwards we jump into our expectations for the rest of the show, part of which is happening this evening, and the rest over the next couple of days. That's the bulk of the show for this week, but we'll be back in 7 days or less with another trip to Doone's Digital Frontier, so don't miss out!

Tacktix is back to tackle another issue, and this time he's brining to light some issues with the "Can't Catch Up" myth, along with presenting his "90/10" rule. You'll have to listen to the episode to know what he means by all of this, but the TLDR version is that this has to do with PvE gear treadmills along with the issue of gear in PvP engagements. We tackle these issues and have some witty banter about the games we've been playing lately as well. Check it out and let us know what your thoughts are!

Welcome back to another episode of the show. This weekend I spent some time out of town, and we didn't really plan around that so I ended up just slapping together a short show for your listening pleasure. I talk about some free-to-play fuckery, announce the NBI, and cover some idiocy on the internet. I won't say more or else I'll spoil the show, as it's rather short. Talking to yourself is rather weird but I hope it ended up sounding alright in the end! We'll be back next week with our regularly scheduled news show. Until then, enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend!

We're back with another episode of "Hot Podtatoe Headlines!" This week we've gathered up a bunch of news stories from around the web, and the overall theme seems to deal with video game movie adaptations. We spend a chunk of time on that, and then dive into some of the biggest recent releases, DLCs, and some other smaller nuanced stories that have come up as of late. It's all over the place, and yet still distinctly podtatoe flavored. We're also starting to look forward to our 100th episode which *should* be occurring in August provided we don't miss any weeks between now and then. We think we've come up with a cool way to have some audience interaction, by recording live and allowing audience feedback/questions. If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, let us know! We'd love to have an AMA or something like that with live on the spot questions and comments from our audience. 

Welcome back y'all! We had a supergroup episode planned for this week, where Eri and myself would not only be joined by Doone, but also Tacktix. Unfortunately Eri's Internet has been out for a while, so she was unable to join us. As a result we changed the topic up a bit because the show we had planned was her brainchild. Still, we settled on talking about consequences in gaming, relating it to both in-game communities but also real life. There were some recent news stories that coincided well with the topic as well, so they were peppered among the discussion. We also had some issues with the recording software, which is nothing new for podcasters, so we ended up splicing a couple different takes together into one cohesive package. We tried out the Zencastr software which was rather reliable and may be what we use in the future, provided it continues to impress. Anyway, take a listen and as always thanks for your support!

Welcome back to weekly shows! As I mentioned the other day on Twitter, we are going back to a weekly schedule after a couple of months of biweekly shows. "So, it's been a couple of months that @couchpodtatoes has been operating on a bi-weekly schedule. This was due in part to busy schedules. It's also hard coming up with something fresh to discuss every week. I know I was feeling a bit of fatigue when it came to being creative. We had an answer... we went biweekly and took on another co-host. But now we're feeling re-energized. I personally was missing doing it every week. I love talking with my co-hosts. We also had some positive feedback recently and want to keep things going strong for our fans. So I'm happy to announce that Couch Podtatoes is going back to a weekly schedule. We'll have something new for you this weekend, so keep an eye out for that. Our biweekly shows will remain the same with our other hosts. Thanks for dealing with our shit while we figured things out! And sorry for the spam!" With th

Welcome back to another episode of the show. We're back with Tacktix for an in-depth discussion about Cynicism and how it can relate to gaming. We tackle how some of us feel that we have become more cynical with age, how skepticism, apathy and other factors can affect our moods towards gaming itself, the industry and our communities. We round it out with how cynicism and trust are related. Of course, we also talk a bit about what we've been playing lately too. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

For this episode we are taking a look back at a topic we've covered before, though it was way back in our fifth episode. The topic is diversity, but whereas we were just cutting our teeth on the topic back then, this time around we're asking: "How are we doing?" We touch on some recent news stories, politics, and a bunch of other things along with talking about what we've been playing. Doone's back with us for this discussion, and we have some fun, share some laughs, and dig deep into the big issues of the day. A pretty typical Couch Podtatoes episode :)

I announced officially in a recent post that the Couch Podtatoes podcast would be dropping to a biweekly schedule. In all honesty, I could probably still manage to squeeze out an episode a week, but I've been feeling like the show needed a change of direction for a while now. Most of the positive feedback we've received has been in response to shows where we had guests. Doone has been a permanent guest with us from the beginning, and we've had many other guests throughout the years, but I thought it would be prudent to pick up another guest host and it just so happened to coincide with our busier schedules which lead to the drop in frequency. Tacktix, the author of the Tough Love Critic blog (see links below) has been ranting over on his blog about various topics for some time now. He mentioned to me at one point thinking about doing a podcast, so I thought I'd give him an outlet to rant on ours. Once a month, just like Doone, we'll have Tacktix joining us and bringing something new and interesting to the tab

Doone's back for another round of the Digital Frontier. This time around we're diving into the topic of love and sex. It was supposed to happen sometime in February since he likes to call that "the month of love" but all of us have had really busy schedules so we've been on a sort of bi-weekly schedule for the show recently. This is something I considered doing from now on, dropping to a bi-weekly schedule, but after talking about it with Eri we decided we want to stick to the weekly schedule. So thanks for bearing with us this past month, we're going to nail down a new schedule and keep it going. We're nearing two years of the show already, and it would be a shame to let it dwindle into obscurity. So yeah, it's an interesting topic and we had some fun recording it. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as we did. We'll see you again in a week. 

I should actually be posting episode 81 by now, but due to some scheduling difficulties and yet another recording mishap, we managed to be a week late posting episode 80. Had something gone better, I would have gotten number 81 out around now. Doone was supposed to record with us again last Friday, but then I went out of town and Eri wasn't able to connect with him. Then on Sunday I managed to get Wilhelm from The Ancient Gaming Noob on as a guest and the three of us attempted to record the show, but my recording program decided not to record anything. Thankfully Wilhelm was a good sport and I managed to connect with him Tuesday evening to record this episode, though due to time zones we couldn't get Eri on at the same time. We still managed to have a lengthy discussion about the first year of Daybreak Games and the highs and lows that came along with it. As a fellow Norrath lover, we gushed about the glory days of EQ for a while as well. Overall it was a fun show, hope you all enjoy it after the long wait. W