Ian Michael Waddell (Animalia) and Elizabeth Smyth (Bogeyman) are doing a podcast on the IFComp, and the first episode is out.
Also they made a trailer if you hadn’t listened to that.
Hehe. Ian Michael, on Sugarlawn (lightly paraphrased to remove ums, ers, sort-ofs, etc.):
Mike is bombarding you with interesting historical facts while you’re playing this game.
…
On the interactive fiction forums right now, there is this ongoing discussion: who’s got the highest score? Who has the highest prize total at the end of the game? So people are trying to optimize their runthroughs of Sugarlawn to get the best prize total. And I’m laughin’ because how much have these players learned about Louisiana just by connecting, say, a small steamship model with the steamship room, and listening to the narration about it? It’s really clever.
…
It’s fascinating to me that the purpose of the game for a lot of players is maximize their score. But for me it’s just, like, I want to learn more about Louisiana; I’ve never been to Louisiana.
Good point; that is a great thing about the game, that it doesn’t require you to care about the score. I definitely did appreciate the attention to detail that went into the surroundings, but for me it was almost all things that I already knew (I wasn’t familiar with one of the books, for sure), so it didn’t really register as an educational thing.
This is a fun podcast. Seems like good audio quality to me, good pacing, interesting opinions…well worth a listen.
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Not all the way through, but Ian and Elizabeth are delightful!
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Looks like their new episode went up a couple of days ago.
- Old Jim’s Convenience Store by Anssi Räisänen (3:10)
- For the Cats by Lei (8:25)
- The Legendary Hero Has Failed. by Tom Martin (14:58)
- Rip Retold by Hipolito (20:42)
- Slugocalypse by Charlotte (23:47)
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I made a Patreon account so that I could listen to this podcast. I really enjoyed the first 2 episodes and hope there will be more!
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You don’t need an account to listen to the podcast!
I tried listening to it without an account, just couldn’t get it to work.
Really? That’s strange. Do you mind detailing how it wasn’t working for you without an account?
(also thank you all for your nice words about the podcast! We should have another episode ready next week!)
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When I had tried it earlier, I was seeing exactly what was in Hanon’s screenshot, but the play button did nothing, and clicking on the download link just led to a page saying “Expired URL.” When I made a Patreon account, though, the play button worked. This was both in Chrome and Edge.
I just tried it again now without logging into Patreon and the play button does work, but the download link still says “Expired URL.”
Hey thanks for flagging this up! I think it’s an unfortunate side effect of using patreon in ways it was never supposed to be used. There’s a setting you can turn on that automatically gives patrons a link to download your audio files – but ofc we don’t have any patrons, and there’s no setting to turn that on for the general public. So I manually include the link it gives me. Which is clearly not a foolproof system. I’m glad you at least managed to get to the ep in the end.
Answers the question of why more people don’t misuse patreon in this way, because it’s fiddly as hell 
In general, thanks for the nice words as well! I’m really glad people are enjoying the show 
we just posted episode three! and now the competition is almost over??? what a wild ride
- Break Stuff by Amy Clare Fontaine (2:45)
- Out by Viktor Sobol (9:50)
- Winter Break at Hogwarts by Brian Davies (16:00)
- Chuk and the Arena by Agnieszka Trzaska (23:58)
- Abandon Them by Alan Beyersdorf (29:00)
- A Blue Like No Other by Dan Cox (30:55)
let us know if you’re having issues with listening and we’ll try to sort it out. enjoy!
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Another great episode! You got me to try out a couple of IFComp entries I otherwise might have skipped.
I love how you tie in other stories you’ve enjoyed. Now I know about Wizard People, Dear Reader and Galax_Arena.
If you keep this podcast going after IFComp, I’ll donate.
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Woah! Yet another episode! With Ed Sibley and Katherine Morayati, no less!
Edit: Heh. You can tell I hadn’t quite finished the previous episode–they said they had an episode coming with guests.
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Thanks! I really enjoy listening to reviews after having played the games myself. In this episode, I especially like the review of robotsexpartymurder. Both the review and the game was so much fun! 
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We did the thing, again: https://www.patreon.com/posts/2020-episode-1-42339524
A very loose episode. We scroll through the list of IFComp 2020 games live on air and record our reactions, read blurbs, comment on particularly striking art, etc. I reviewed Congee, which I heartily enjoyed. We’ll get more in-depth next episode. Enjoy!
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In episode two we talk about eight games https://www.patreon.com/posts/2020-episode-2-42620288
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I’ve even played half of those games! That’s statistically unlikely!
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I’m don’t think it’s reasonable to assume independent sampling. We all (except for the few saints who really do stick to their personal shuffle) mostly choose to play games based on their authors, cover art and blurbs.
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I stuck to my personal shuffle! (For now.)
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