talking live

You know, I've recorded 57 episodes of Noobtoob now, and even though Yuzo and I are much more fluid and relaxed on the air now (Go back and listen to our first 10 episodes if you want to hear what stilted and painful sounds like. Seriously. It takes a long time to get your sea legs and not sound like a robot.), there's still some issues that I constantly wrestle with.

One is preparedness. Often times, like tonight, I give a review for a game like Metroid, and then after we're done recording, I think of like 10 things I could have mentioned about the plot or the mechanics or the controls that I think would have made our review better, and it bugs me that I think what I said was far too shallow and low on examples.

However, we've also tried the other way, where we actually take down some notes on things that we want to say about a game, and that's a disaster. You end up reading from a script of bullet points, and a show that's mostly about discussion and interaction ends up losing that ability to talk to the other person, because you're waiting for your next list point, and barreling through something.

We've learned a lot about how to speak, too. A two person show, you have to talk to each other, not the camera. Any time you step outside first person, and say "Yuzo did this" or "we thought this", you're talking about yourselves, instead of to each other, and then the show stops being a discussion. There's a lot of easy conversational traps to fall into, and it's stuff you don't think about in a normal conversation, because it's okay to not be first person in day to day life.

Anyway, I think we recorded a great episode tonight. And an intro skit that involves the phrase "Damn right your ass is bleeding", which is always quality. I just wish I'd remembered to talk about how the enemies in Metroid take too many shots to kill, or how allowing you to scan objects in game allows them to skip a lot of crappy plot movies, since you get to discover the data yourself. Ah well. Someday I'll perfect this whole game podcast thing. :)