As I sit in an Internet Cafe in Tokyo, I decided to take advantage of the high bandwidth and check out a bunch of episodes of the popular online vidcast, Coin Op TV!.

As you can guess from the title, it covers retro games.

For the most part, it is well produced. All the episodes involve reporting on the field using decent quality microphones and have camerawork that is fairly decent. Editing of the segments is a bit plain at times, which is ironically somewhat refreshing-- no avant garde editing techniques here!

The episode on the recent I am 8 Bit! art exhibition in LA was kind of sloppy because the host had a lack of knowledge of computer games. If you are going to host a show, you better be a decent study of the subject. Another episode interviewing a Japanese designer of a recent King of Fighter video game was better, but featured sloppy audio editing (the Japanese interview had overlaid English audio to translate it, but the English was mixed too low so you could barely hear what was being said).

Other episodes hosted by other hosts fared a bit better. The site is still worth checking out in spite of a few minor technical flaws (why no streaming eps on YouTube?).