Game Dev Story

Written by Aidy.

Being in a band is hard work but that hard work is also coupled with a fair amount of downtime spent in hotel rooms, waiting for other bands to sound check and on long car journeys. Luckily for us we're all fortunate enough to own iPhone's! There's never a dull moment when you've got an iPhone and a seemingly infinite supply of video games. Recently the game of choice for myself and Dave has been Game Dev Story from Kairosoft.

For a mere £2.49 you get to run a video games company for a period of twenty years developing games for the PC and a variety of consoles. You get to hire and fire people, develop new games and eventually you can even build your own consoles. This is possibly the most addictive game I've played since the nineties (when games were good). But the best feature of all is the fact that you can choose the titles for all the video games your fictitious company develops and there's no profanity filter. This is great when you're as childish as us, check out some of these screenshots.

Overdubs & Guests

Written by Aidy.

We're still beavering away at Half-Ton Studios attempting to create the greatest indie album known to man and we're getting pretty close now. Hopefully we'll even have a single out within the next month with the album to follow very shortly. If you've pre-ordered then we'll be sending you the single for free as a little thank you for your patience.

We've now got a solid foundation musically and we've been overdubbing with percussion, guitars, synth and all sorts. Plus we've been very lucky to have a few guest musician's on this album including Anna Scott (cello), Dave Simpson (lead guitar), Kerry Devine (backing vocals) and hopefully a few more yet to come.

 

Stockton Calling

Written by Aidy.

Stockton's fast becoming our little home away from home and we're back up there again this weekend for Stockton Calling playing alongside the likes of Pigeon Detectives and Laura Gibson. We'll be playing at The Vault and we'd like to thank our manager Matt Speight for getting us this one, especially since we're all massive Bluetones fans and we're on right before the legendary Mark Morriss, so as you can imagine we're really looking forward to this one!

You can get tickets here: http://www.stocktoncalling.co.uk

 

Beeb@30

Written by Aidy.

If there's one thing I love it's wallowing in nostalgia and learning about the pioneers of the industry of which I'm proud to be a part of and this Sunday I got to do both of those things. I was lucky enough to attend Beeb@30 which celebrated 30 years of the BBC Micro and the Computer Literacy project. Hosted at the ARM offices in Cambridge by The Museum of Computing History, this was a real treat, especially since I grew up with both the BBC Micro and the Acorn Electron. The fastest thing I can still type to this day is word 'chain' thanks to the people that were in that room. I even got my photo taken with Chris Curry, the man who's cinematic counterpart uttered the words "We could've been the British IBM" in Micro Men. Great days!!

The Iain Lee Pocket Radio Show

Written by Aidy.

The Iain Lee Pocket Radio Show

As Chris Curry said in Micro Men "We have to advertise on TV like IBM and Commodore!" well our budget doesn't quite stretch as far TV (yet) but we've managed to get a bit of a cheeky plug on the excellent Iain Lee's Pocket Radio Show podcast. We're all really pleased about this as we're massive fans of his radio antics, the 11 O Clock show and of course the epic retro gaming documentary Thumb Candy.

We're mentioned on episode 4 and can find the podcast on iTunes or just head here:
Ian Lee's Pocket Radio Show