I watched it last year, and I’ll be watching it this time. LoadingReadyRun returns for this year’s Desert Bus for Hope marathon this weekend, starting at 9pm EST on 19 November.

The marathon, which has various members of the comedy group play an extremely dull minigame from the never-released minigame collection Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD, is an effort to raise money for the Child’s Play charity organization, which buys video game consoles and games for children in hospitals.

Along with just playing the game, the members of LoadingReadyRun will also have a webcam feed showing what’s going on in their headquarters, known as the Moonbase. Last year, people could make challenges for LRR members (if that challenge was accompanied by a donation to Child’s Play). Challenges could be anything from having someone sign a song, to acting out a skit, or reading something. It was up to the donor’s imagination (and within good taste and humor).

The marathon will last as long as donations keep coming in. Additional gameplay hours will cost a certain amount, with additional hours having a certain percentage cost added to the previous hour that was unlocked. A difference from last year, where the various “drivers” would take four-hour shifts, is that four members of LRR (James, Jeremy, Morgan, Bill, and Kathleen) will be taking 24-hour shifts. That’s right, 24-hour shifts of Desert Bus.

For those unfamiliar with the game, Desert Bus was, as mentioned earlier, a minigame from the canceled Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD. In this minigame, you drive a bus from Tuscon, AZ, to Las Vegas, NV, at a constant speed of 45 mph. You can’t slow down, and you can’t drive any faster. You drive along a straight road, with no other traffic, and the bus veers slightly to the right, meaning you have to constantly correct the bus with the controller. If you go too far off the road, the bus stalls and a tow-truck will eventually appear and tow you back to whichever of the two cities you started from. All of this plays out in real time, meaning that a one-way drive takes a continuous 8 hours of game play to complete.

This is the fourth annual Desert Bus for Hope marathon, and the full press release for the event follows under the cut.

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This episode has been on the feed for at least a week, but I’m only now noticing I don’t have a blog post up about it. So here we go, some notes on episode 35 of Radio Free Caemlyn.

On the evening of 31 October, 2010, I was perusing the /v/ section of 4chan. Some anon had started a thread wherein they asked fellow anon to visit a certain website and record themselves saying the following quote from Fallout: New Vegas, “Patrolling the Mohave makes me wish for a nuclear winter.” Most anon followed the directions and recorded themselves saying that particular quote, but a good many deviated from that rule and said other things. A lot of the results were quite hilarious, so I decided to rip the audio with Audacity and piece them together in a podcast, with music backing.

This is the result.

Anyway, it was fun piecing that together. Hope you enjoy the result.