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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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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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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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

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Why Don’t Square Remake Final Fantasy VII?

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.

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The idea of the segment will be 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. The plan is to 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 next week’s show. We will be covering RPGs and the question that I pose to you thus: -

Why has there not been a Final Fantasy 7 remake yet? And if there was, what changes would have to be made to its formula, to fit within the modern day standards?

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.

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.

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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.

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My Generation.

Since the Xbox 360 was launched in 2005 we’ve all come to embrace the many changes that it brought to us, along with those of the PS3 and Wii, launched a year later. But now that we’ve become complacent with the advantages and internet connectivity they delivered, we can barely imagine a world where we can’t see what our friends are playing every time we’re online and never find ourselves unable to walk further than two meters from the television with our controllers.

Tonight, let us explore that world by looking back on just what innovations we’ve been party to that would be impossible to abandon now. To chat with us, we have Dan Illson, a man with close links to Some Other Castle. We finish off with what we’ve been playing over Christmas; many RPG’s.

Note: During the show I call Final Fantasy XII “Ugly”, I realise that this clearly isn’t the case, it’s quite beautiful in fact, but that statement does speak volumes for how inured I am to HD gaming. -Alex.

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