The Guild: Continued

Felicia Day From "The Guild"

The last I heard from “The Guild” — the hilarious online mini-series about online gaming — they had taken an offer from Microsoft that I originally wasn’t terribly excited about. I can see the plus side of it, though. Producing a quality product like The Guild takes money and Microsoft undeniably has money. The fine print though, in the contract with Satan, was that Microsoft-sponsored episodes would no longer be available through traditional outlets like Youtube, only MSN Video, Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live.

I had some concerns about what this would mean to me as a Mac user. I love the guild and I assumed that “MSN Video” had something to do with the MSN Messenger client. Yes, I know there’s a Mac version, but the Mac version also sucks and doesn’t have 2% of the functionality of the Windows version. It turns out I was wrong. MSN Video is, more accurately, Microsoft’s version of YouTube. (Yeah, I’d never used it before either.) You can’t link to videos directly or embed them in blogs. Typical Microsoft suck of epic proportions. So go to http://video.msn.com and type “the guild season 2″ in the search box. Yes, it’s clumsy. But it’s the only way I’ve found to link to the second season.

There are two seasons “in the can” so far and I have to say that the one positive thing about the Microsoft involvement is that the production quality has improved immensely. The writing is still as brilliant as always, but now it looks more like a primetime television show and less like a Blair Witch spin-off.

I would gladly take a Microsoft watermark or even Microsoft advertising if it meant I could watch the episodes on Youtube though.

I wonder when somebody at Microsoft is going to realize that both of those desk microphones they use are Logitechs. I’m really quite surprised that Season 2 hasn’t featured Microsoft hardware more prominently.