Tuesday 3 May 2016

Podcast Love - Polygon Longform

Polygon Longform logo

I used to have plenty of free time that I'd spend playing a lot of video games, and as part of that I kept up-to-date with plenty of gaming news. These days life, work and baby have meant that free time is tighter and there's a lot more to fit in. Audiobooks and podcasts have helped a lot, allowing me to multitask-tetris entertainment into daily life where it wouldn't otherwise have been practical.

Recently filling the videogame void for me is Polygon Longform, a podcast that gathers spoken word versions of feature articles from gaming news and reviews site polygon.com, read by Polygon's Dave Tach.

The episodes are a bit sporadic, but there's a decent back-catalogue of episodes to go through. Stories focus on the history and development of games along with the industry and people that produce them. From the life-story of Looking Glass Studios to a feature on the evolution of Starcraft, if you're interested in videogames there's bound to be something in the mix that you'll enjoy.

I particularly enjoyed the episode Digital Archaeology which describes the painstaking restoration of classic 90s adventure game Grim Fandango. This was a game that I was desperate to play as a teenager but couldn't (my PC wasn't up to the job) and that I finally got to try in its resurrected form on the PS4, which made the story of how this came to happen really intriguing.

I've also ended up listening to a number of things I wouldn't ordinarily have been drawn to on the website that turned out to be really interesting, like an article on the games industry in Iran or the story of how Xbox Live came to be.

The articles are put together by various people at Polygon but are consistently well-written, engaging and enjoyable. Episodes are professionally produced and Dave Tach's friendly and engaging narration is perfect for the podcast. My only wish is that they'd come out more frequently, as I've now run out of new episodes to listen to!

You can find more information on the podcast and where to find it on the Polygon website here. Happy listening!

Image credit: Polygon.com