Before you listen to tonight’s first installment of our epic two-part show on how to start your own podcast have a listen to both Gamers with Jobs and Sanctuary 4 Gamers. We actually helped Steve of S4G with a skit he did a few weeks ago on their Episode #78 (guest starring Justin McEleroy from Joystiq). It’s a cracking show with some mightily impressive editing and a huge community.

This week’s Community Intelligence question is: -

What would you like to know about podcasting?

Next week’s show to be recorded on Thursday 1st April is a special 150th episode where we will be digging deep into what it takes to put this little thing called a podcast together. This is your chance to ask us anything you’ve ever wanted to know about what it takes to make your weekly dose of DC possible. We should have two special guests joining us on this podcast so there will be multiple viewpoints, so get asking!

This week we are honoured to welcome to the show, acclaimed comedian, radio host, and television presenter; Iain Lee. Long known for his connection to several gaming TV shows and the little-known but high quality documentary; Thumb Candy.

We pick Iain’s brains about the various appearences he’s made over the years and ask him some probing questions about the games industry and the tricky business of marketing gaming TV shows.

After the interview there’s some important news about our upcoming 150th episode and how you can give us some questions for it.

A massive thank you to Mr Lee who was very kind and helpful with us on his Sunday evening.

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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.

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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.

http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge

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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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