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.

If you wish to donate, the page is here http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge

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

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The idea of the segment is to give you the community a chance to have a voice on our show, but in a far more interesting way than just listener mail. We dedicate the last few minutes of certain shows covering a topic that we set out for you. This will normally have some correlation with what we will be discussing on the following week’s show.

There is one simple rule: -
Keep your answers short as long essays are hard to do justice to.

Now how is this going to work? Well, we give you four options: -

• The first is you can leave a voicemail via Skype, name Digitalcowboys
• Leave a comment on our website at www.thedigitalcowboys.com
• Send us an email on mailbag@digitalcowboys.com
• Or lastly, leave a post under the dedicated forum thread

So it’s time to set out the topic for you for this week’s show. We will be covering Achievements this week and the question that I pose to you thus: -

Achievement points and Trophies have changed gaming forever!

Some people love them and some people hate them but tell us what you think and we shall read it out on the show

So there we go you’ve got your assignment for the week and we look forward to hearing your comments and this is open to any followers of the Digital Cowboys, so podcasters, PR Persons but most importantly, the general community.

24 Hours, 24 games (total coincidence in the end). We hit 7500 gamerpoints, 2500 more than our initial aim of 5000. And massive, massive thanks to all of you who donated we’ve made over £1000 for Medecins Sans Frontieres so far. It was an amazing and exhausting experience and we had members of our community along for the ride every step of the way in a hastily organized video chat-room.

You can still donate here.  http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge There will be no cut off date and considering the recent earthquake in Chile your donations will definitely be going to much-needed use. We’re unusually humbled by the fact that as foolish and punishing an undertaking as this was for the two of us, it will genuinely help people. It’s not often we can say that about the things we do.

Special thanks go out to Giles for helping us bring this to fruition and donating a massive chunk of the funds. True to his word he gave us £10 per 100 points. This week’s podcast will be edited highlights of our recordings so you can listen to us get more and more frazzled.

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

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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.

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We’re moving this back a week to the 27th and 28th of February. The principle reason being that Tony is recovering from a nasty bout of flu and it would seem cruel and unusual punishment to deprive him of sleep and make him play CSI: Hard Evidence. We know that our community care about us being fighting fit and able to take on this challenge with gusto rather than actually being in pain.

The donations page is still here.

Thanks so much to everybody who has donated already. We’ve got over £200 so far and we’re 11% towards our goal already. It seems only Giles wants to sponsor us per gamer point so we’re going to pull out all the stops when it comes to getting them. Join us next weekend for the 24-Hour Marathon. Constant Twitter and forum updates. Estimated start time is 11am.

For those listeners last week who, like me were listening intently to Leon reeling off his list of the best quality Wii titles, here is the breakdown in no particular order. Some of them are standalone discs, some are Wii Ware.

• Mario Kart Wii
• Super Mario Galaxy
• New Mario Bros Wii
• Muramasa: The Demon Blade
• Boom Blox and the follow-up Boom Blox Party
• Legend of Zelda: Twilght Princess
• Metroid Prime Trilogy
• Mad World
• Dead Space Extraction
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• Tatsunoku VS. Capcom
• Super Paper Mario
• Zack and Wiki
• Little Kings Story
• Lost Winds and it’s sequel; Winter of the Melodias
• Nyx Quest
• De Blob
• A Boy and His Blob
• World of Goo
• Order Up
• Bonsai Barber
• Bit Trip Beat and Bit Trip Core
• Lit
• Max and the Magic Marker
• Swords and Soldiers
• You, Me and the Cubes
• Tomena Sanner
• Miboshi the Three Shape Arcade
• Tales of Monkey Island

OK folks. This is a call out to all of you who would like to be on the show. This Thursday evening Tony and I will be on Skype. We want to do a Room 101 episode starring our community. If you want to be on the show, jump onto the thread on the community forums here, request a time slot and email me your Skype name if I don’t already have it.

Slots Available…

7.00pm
7.30pm
8.00pm
8.30pm
9.00pm
9.30pm

What you have to bring to the show is something that you’re sick of about games, the games industry or even gamers themselves. The aim is to make a convincing enough argument that the thing you hate gets cast into the fiery pit of Room 101. Conversely Tony and I have the task of playing devil’s advocates and trying to make a case for keeping your pet peeve out in the world. We’ve done three of these shows already and they’re always great fun and really entertaining.

Episode #114: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/2009/07/digital-cowboys-episode-114-room-101/

Episode #67: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/2008/08/digital-cowboys-episode-67/

Episode #11: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/2007/07/digital-cowboys-episode-11/

We’ll be updating throughout the night on Twitter. Let us know what you think.

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.

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