Most of the podcasts I listen to are tech-heavy. Just a warning. I will list each one and give a short description of each an whether its an audio or video podcasts. I have 3 categories: Tech, Gaming, and Misc. I personally use a 30GB Zune (Brown) to listen  or watch my podcasts only because it was such a good deal. I purchased it for $85 on woot.com! The podcast list is shown after the break.

TECH SHOWS

SYSTM [Video]

SYSTM is a hand-on tech show created for the hardcore DIY Hardware crowd. It’s also hosted by Patrick Norton but the show was originally started by Kevin Rose back when he worked for TechTV and G4. You will learn such things as Building your own NAS, DIY WiFi Antennas, and DIY Power Packs.

Diggnation [Video]

Diggnation is a weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories. The hosts are Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht who are both G4 Screensavers alumni. Kevin Rose started the Digg.com website as a news site where users “digg” or vote for the stories they like the most and the most popular hit the frontpage. Well Kevin and Alex review the top stories while drinking tasty beer beverages out of their houses which make for some colorful commentary. You can see why their show is so popular LoL. Recently they have been branching out of their California homes and starting going to areas around the country to meet their fans. Their show usually ranges from 30 minutes to 1 hour. They have a email answer segment at the end of the show and usually show fans in Digg shirts around the country.

GAMING

1UP Yours [Audio]

1UP Yours is the premier videogames podcast where hosts Garnett Lee, Shane Bettenhausen and John Davison report on the videogame industry and the community that surrounds it. This is a really long podcast and it can range from 1:30 hours to 2:30 hours. This is a casual gaming podcast and they stray sometimes from their own format to talking on a variety of subjects. The hosts are editors and game testers from some of the popular gaming publications like EGM, 1Up, GameVideos.com, etc. You will hear them talk about game current on the market as well as those still in production. One of the best segments is “What are you playing?” where the hosts and guests talk about what games they are into at the moment.

1UP Show [Video]

Each week, the editors of 1UP cover new titles and discuss the latest topics in gaming - all the while giving you a behind the scenes look at the on goings at the offices of 1UP, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Games for Windows magazine. The show gives some great insight into the games they review by doing interviews with the staff of 1up while showing you game footage. They also have some great interviews with game developers as well. You can also see great field reporting from such places as E3, Quakecon, and Comicon.

MISC

The Totally Rad Show [Video or Audio]

The Totally Rad Show is the summer blockbuster of geek news shows. Every week, hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata rip into the world of movies, video games, tv, comics, and more and pull out what’s rad. Most shows last 1 to 1:30 hours. They have either a audio or video feed. They have a quirky and fun approach to their reviews. Every show is started with the guys recreating a scene from one of their favorite movies of the past.

NPR Fresh Air [Audio]

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio’s most popular programs. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators.

This American Life [Audio]

The radio and TV shows follow the same format. There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe. Ten Commandents was the last program I listened to and Ira Glass goes over the real ten commandents by personal interviews with each person’s account of one of the ten.

Here is the description of the game straight off the website:

“Jimmy lives a simple life. All he’s got is a roll of toilet paper. Until the faithful day that his TP rolled away. You play as Jimmy on his epic adventure to get back all that belongs to him and find love and meaning to his life on the way.”

This is a cute little game anyone can play and just like crayon physics, its easy to pick up, moderately challenging and pretty fun. Check it out and let me know what you think of it. Here is the link to download the game to try it out:
http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/tp

This video is in two parts so make sure and keep watching till after 2:49. Trust me it gets funnier.

Too funny!

Digg Link

Yes its true! My Xbox 360 speaks to me and it does so with vigor and humor. It even makes me sad when I don’t play it every day. This is made possible by a fun little website called 360Voice.com The site basically uses your gamertag on Xbox Live to create an automatic blog per day, based on your activity. The automated system is written very well you would swear someone is at the keyboard writing these each day. I have not seen a repeated phrase yet. These automated blogs are what the site creators call Blogjects, which are basically “objects that write “blogs” about their interactions with the world and other devices just like humans write about their interactions with the world and other people.”

Whenever you play a game on Xbox Live, at the end of the day 360 Voice will make an entry in your blog similar to this:

I thought curs0r just wanted to listen to music or watch a DVD. Turns out he was there to game. With a gamer score of 2,403, I should have known that was the case. He rallied Call of Duty 4, and then the lightweight went to bed. Freakin’ wuss.

When you don’t play any games that day 360Voice will say something like this and make you feel like you ripped out its soul:

curs0r, there are 86,400 seconds in a day and you couldn’t find a few to spend with me? Lame.

If you add some friends to your watchlist you can also get some entries like this added to your daily blog:

It is probably better that curs0r didn’t play yesterday… it gives BlexBox360 an opportunity to add to that 3,320 gamerscore and increase the lead… Booooo!

If you want to see more of my blog on 360Voice click here. Oh and when you see the entries about Tetris Splash and Uno, that’s my wife. I wouldn’t play that crap. :)

What are “Freemium” games you ask? Freemium stands for “free-to-play premium games” based on their most popular titles in order to attract new audiences and open new revenue advertising revenue streams. Games like this have been limited in the past to flash or 2D games. Implementing games such as these in the FPS market is a new venture and two of the biggest franchises are taking a stab at it: Id Software with their Quake and Doom franchises and Dice the makers of Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2042.

Id Software is building Quake Live from the widely popular Quake III Arena engine and Dice is building Battlefield Heroes, a brand new “cartoon shooter” similar to the cell-shaded Team Fortress 2 from Valve. Both games will be offering a totally free to play, web based experience that is targeting a broader audience then their typical games which appealed more to the hardcore gamers of the world. This is becoming a popular trend now for gaming with the advent of the Nintendo Wii and more gamers opting to play console games over PC games due to the stringent PC specs required to run the latest FPS games. These games are hoping to capitalize on the idea of the FPS experience without the need for the top of the line PC.

Quake Live was first announced as “Quake Zero” at 2007’s Quakecon in Dallas,TX. Not much has been shown about Quake Live but from John Carmack’s speech it seems like the game will be the same Quake III game from 8 years ago with some minor tweaking. The game will have the advantage of running at 60 Frames per second on pretty much any modern PC. Not much is said about how the advertising will be implemented in the game but if it is like the picture I mocked up, then I’m not sure if I want to play it.

If you want to sign up for the beta go to http://www.quakelive.com and submit your email.

Battlefield Heroes seems to be a rewritten from the ground up since it is to be a cartoon shooter. From what I read on IGN.com’s preview, the game is free to play, but you’ll have the option to spend cash on microtransactions. The examples they gave were visual items for your character (glasses, hats, boots, jackets etc.) and convenience items. How the convenience items work are kind of a different approach to what you have in MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft where you can play someone to play the game for you to get to a Level 50. In Heroes, you pay for items which give you double the experience of what the free players are getting. The gameplay will be third-person but it will switch to first-person in sniper mode with some guns. On the advertising side, the article states that “advertising exists on the website and on loading screens, but not in the actual game.”

Battlefield Heroes Teaser Trailer

[flv]http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/videos/battlefield-heroes-trailer.flv[/flv]

Both games look very promising and it will be interesting to see which one wins out in the end. Of the two, Battlefield Heroes looks to be more polished and closer to being released. Keep your eyes open.

Zero Punctuation - This one is for the gamers out there. This reviewer is one of the most irreverent, potty-mouthed, bastard of a reviewer I have ever heard but…I love it! His name is Yahtzee, who is a british-born Australian game reviewer. I would describe his style of reviews as part Micro Machine Man, stick figure graphics, sarcasm, and vulgar. Here are three of the games I have he reviewed lately: Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed. Check him out, at the very least you will be entertained.

F**k Planet Earth - This one might not be safe for work but you could get by watching it at work with some headphones. This is a parody of the Planet Earth series on Discovery. That is all I am going to say and no you didn’t have to see the show to get it.

Skateboarding Explosions in SloMo - Well if you have ever seen slomotion skateboarding videos before then this is just like those videos plus some TnT! If you liked that video here is another one of the same caliber: Invisible Skating.

10 of Geekiest Home Theater setups - Here are a list of some sweet home theater setups based on scifi, movies, TV shows, etc. Basically if you have money to blow, you too can have your theater look like the batcave, Egypt, the enterprise, the death star, whatever you desire.

The Guild - This is a little gem of a show I found while scouring youtube. It is a comedy about the lives of some WoW Guild members and their lives online and off. Each character has unique traits that set them apart. The show was recently featured on the LA Times. Here is their official website as well.

….Ohh I lied no kiddy videos here :)

Check out these specs Minimum/Recommended:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista (only)
• Processor:Dual Core 2.6GHz Intel or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ /Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better
• RAM: 2 GB / 3GB
• Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0–compliant video card /512 MB video card recommended (see supported list)*
• Hard Drive Space: 12 GB
• *Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
  ATI RADEON X1300-1950 / HD 2000 / 3000 series
  NVIDIA GeForce 6600-6800 / 7 / 8 / 9 series

Hmm $300-400 console or $2000-$3000 computer. Easy decision for me. The last PC game I purchased was Half Life 2: Orange Box. I guess that will be my last PC game for a while.

The game is normally 800 MS Points ($10). I like the feature list of the game. It has a single player campaign, on and offline co-op, and multiplayer for 2-16 players over Xbox LIVE for Gold subscribers. The other nice thing that peaked my interest is the ability to setup an offline game against the computer by adding bots. I know bots usually have bad AI and are basically repetitive in movements but one of the best times I’ve had with gaming resulted from a impromptu LAN party playing Battlefield 1942 on the Normandy map against 60 Nazi bots! We played that level for hours. I say bring back the bots in multiplayer gaming :) Anyway here are some links to wet your appetite for the game:

Gamerscore blog story

IGN.Com Review’d it with a 8.7 out of 10

In case you didn’t know the 1Up Show is a weekly video podcast from the editors of EGM (Electronic Gaming Month, for the non-gamers). One of their first specials of the year had a segment on new independent free games called Freeloader. They had a few games that were kinda funny and definitely out there (links to follow), but one struck my eye as being new and innovative. The game was called Crayon Physics.

The game itself is very simple: draw squares and lines to move the red ball to the stars. What I really like about it is the mood set by the soundtrack, the ease of use of simply free hand drawing shapes, and the authentic look of crayon on paper. The music is one simple song that loops throughout the 6 different levels, but I love the melodic haunting voice of the woman singing or chanting. Here is a link to the mp3 if you want to take a listen: ghost lullaby. The first game was built as a proof of concept by the author. He has a new version coming out soon called Crayon Physics Deluxe which incorporates the ability to add moving parts, like drawing a car and watching it drive forward. Here is a link to the deluxe page. I will be sure to post a blog when it becomes available.

Next comes Synaesthete which is a mind trip of a game. Its a game that is part Geometry Wars,part Guitar Hero, and part Tron with a techno sound beat.

The pictures really don’t do the game justice. Upon first playing this game, I thought oh great another geometry wars-like game but it really surprised me with how fun it was. Killing monsters to a techno beat is really satisfying!

Here are some other mentioned games:

 Sumotori Dreams - This is basically a poorly done, but funny Drunken Sumo Game. Thats all I’m saying.

 I wanna be that Guy- This is a sadistic look at all those side scrollers of yester year. Super Mario was Patty-Cake conpared to this game. It takes elements from those games and elevates them times infinity. Try it but you have been warned.

I finished out the weekend with Mass Effect. I borrowing it from a friend and you may as well call it “Crack Effect!” I played it until 3:30AM on Sunday! Yay me!