ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 111.
Amid the E3 madness, this crush of new games and games yet to be, we thought we’d take a moment and think a bit about games that are, in one way or another, not new. Let’s talk about games that we replay, and especially the ones that we keep revisiting at different points in life.
Why do we replay games? What kinds of play aren’t quite replaying, but are closely related? Certainly there are lots of games wherein you’re expected to never stop playing, or to come back frequently, but that’s a bit different—or is it? Where do remakes, remasters, and straight-up rereleases fit in? Is there something special about replaying a game without much of a reason?
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• A bunch of the changes made in Super Mario All-Stars were arguably minor, but some weren’t, and in any case there were a bunch of them.
• The handheld rerelease/remake of Final Fantasy Tactics was called Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. The biggest addition was multiplayer.
• Here’s Robert Yang’s piece on the textures in the Final Fantasy XII remake.
• And here’s an example of uniquely bad stewardship that happened since we recorded, even.
• Nobody on the podcast crew has ever played the Electronica 60 version of Tetris. The GameBoy version is pretty gettable, albeit not my straightforward, fully legal means.
• Here’s the Game Discoverability Weekly newsletter.
• The interview with Jordan Thomas on this here podcast took place right at the beginning of The Blackout Club’s Early Access period.
• The very Jewish tabletop RPG I referred to is A Great Miracle Happened Here.
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“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“If I Love Again” by J.P. Marry and Ben Oakland, and “I’m in Love Again” by Cole Porter, performed by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra.
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Everybody's Talking at Once 
Hello Drew Messinger-Michaels,
I love listening to your podcast. I subscribed to the RSS, but the address for this last podcast appears to be incorrect in the RSS Flux.
The flux uses etao-podcast-111-rrr-1.mp3 as the filename, but the site uses etao-podcast-111-rrr.mp3 (note, no -1 suffix). The former does not exists, the podcast software gets a 404 error and it is unhappy.
Hope you can see my message and fix the RSS Flux for your other listeners (in the meantime I’ll listen on the webpage).
Keep up the good work !
Thanks so much for noticing that mistake, which I’ve gone ahead and fixed.
The episode should show up anywhere it was previously missing within the next hour or so.
Beyond that, thanks so very much for listening, and for the kind words!