I’ve either shown up on or straight-ahead launched a number of podcasts in and around the video-gamey space over the past year. Here is what they are!

Venthuffer

I have launched Venthuffer, a weekly audio zine:

Venthuffer is a series of monologues about the Steam Deck video game console. I realized in 2024 that I have become as much of a fan of this machine as I have for any piece of digital hardware since my years of deep identification with the Apple Macintosh, when I was much younger. This discovery surprised me a little, and I wanted a space to explore the reasons for it, out loud. Here it is.

As the rest of its About page states, I’m shooting for ten short, scripted episodes. I’ll make more if I find that there’s still plenty of gas in the tank after that, but I’m not banking on it; Jmac’s Arcade felt complete after only six episodes, after all. But this is a new topic, and a new (which is to say older) me, so who can say.

Listen to the first episode of Venthuffer here.

The launch of Venthuffer got a very kind writeup by Jay Springett, too.

Topic Lords

Back at the top of the year, I had a fantastic time guesting on Topic Lords, a long-running weekly chat show hosted by Jim Stormdancer. The episode I’m on is 224: Following A Garden Hose Around In The Dark, also featuring Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best Games.

Our hour-and-ten conversation was so much fun—and, honestly, so well edited—that I have relistened to the episode a couple of times, just to make myself happy. Topics include jukebox griefing, experiments with nail painting, the science behind color displays, and crackpot theories around a pen-doodle Bach once made.

I should also note that Bumpy Grumpy, the “lost arcade classic” which Nathan mentions on the episode as his then-current project, has since launched on Steam, and it’s fantastic. Charming, delightfully simple to learn, and quite satisfying to get good at. I achieved the Best Ending with it only last month, after pumping countless pretend quarters into it over several months. (And, yes, it plays great on Steam Deck.)

Third Strongest Podcast

In the Third Strongest Podcast, Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, and Zach play through EarthBound, a most peculiar and still-celebrated JRPG released on Nintendo consoles circa 1995. The podcast is 25 episodes long, and somehow I appear on six of them—granted, two are “extrasodes” outside of the main series. You can pick them out by control-effing for my name on the show’s webpage, but honestly you should just listen to the whole series, whether or not you’ve played EarthBound.

In fact, I only started playing EarthBound after listening to the first episode of Third Strongest. (The game is readily available on Switch, through that console’s first-party online emulator.) I emailed the hosts about this fact, and they all got so excited about this bizarre turn that they kept inviting me on to talk about my experiences as a new EarthBound player, versus someone who has played through this game over and over since childhood. I feel like I might have ended up talking about comic books a little too much but I’m still pleased wth my performance.

When preparing to record the first episodes of Venthuffer, I happened across the introduction that I had recorded for the final episode of Third Strongest. I am grateful for the trio’s very kind invitation for me to do this, and I realize now that the pleasure I rediscovered from scripting, recording, and editing a very short monologue about a video game helped inspire Venthuffer, even if it took a while longer to find its hook. So there’s that!

Third Strongest is only one example of a tightly scoped, limited-length podcast series that these hosts have produced. I am compelled to point also to The Complete Guide to Koholint, a show with exactly 256 episodes where each one finds Ryan and Zach deeply discussing a single tile of the 16-by-16 playfield from the original Game Boy edition of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. And the episode selector on its webpage is exactly what it ought to be.