One Life Left's Podcast

Fresh from last week's debate regarding the future of virtual reality systems, we substituted an ill Scanters for a fit Ste in order to continue the conversation. We also got Brynley Gibson in as a Super-Special Guest to pass on his knowledge from working on the Playstation VR. As one of the leading lights in Sony's London Studio he had lots to tell us, apart from anything that we could claim as an EXCLUSIVE. With Ann off ill, and million dollar journalist/substitute newsreader Cara Ellison being busy in Scotland we had to rely on Ste for our news. Listen in to find out if he has learnt anything from eleven seasons of listening to Ann. GameUnder continues his sterling undercover work at EA and Sega Badawi gives us the latest local news. We also find out how to induce motion sickness in people, discuss the Elite Dangerous purchase flow chart and work out if today's kids like Back To The Future. Cheerio!Team OLL x Links:https://twitter.com/brynleygibsonhttps://twitter.com/LondonStudioHQ Track list:1. PSS27

It's a problem having the same person coming into the studio. Sometimes you just run out of things to say to them. Luckily Ste was away this week so we had Mike Bithell in as a Super-Special Guest! Unfortunately he didn't tell us anything about his new game so The Caretaker had to use one of Mike's old games for the episode title again. And as we all know, The Caretaker is incredibly lazy. Luckily, Mike Bithell is not incredibly lazy and was in to discuss how well Volume went down with everyone (and Metacritic). He was also meant to discuss his new game, but he didn't get the memo. Mostly because The Caretaker forgot to send it out. As he didn't get the other memo regarding the sending of memos. Ann is one console down as she sold her Wii when she had a headache, rather than putting it in a bag at the bottom of the canal. Simon went to the Not Twin Peaks diner experience, nearly got run over by a Taxi in Croydon and started a bromance with Mike, who told us how he is spending his fortune. Ann also torpedoed

Sometimes, if you've been really good and wish hard enough then your dreams will come true. This is one of those days. One Life Left is back for its twelfth season on the airwaves! And everyone in the world must have been really, really good as it's time for another Ann Life Left. For those of you who haven't listened to Ann Life Left before what happens is Ann gets a load of people into the studio to talk about how games have had an effect on their lives and how amazing games are. It is consistently highly rated by our focus groups that the caretaker runs on our behalf to help improve our branding. Helping Ann out is SSGP (Super-Special Guest Presenter) Philippa Warr from Rock Paper Shotgun who didn't talk about or play League of Legends for a whole hour so that must surely be reason enough to listen? Cheerio! Team OLL x Links: https://twitter.com/scanters https://twitter.com/philippawarr https://twitter.com/chipzel https://twitter.com/studioanisa https://twitter.com/profaniti https://twitter.com/h4nchan

For the final time this season all of Team OLL was in the studio before we broke for our summer holidays. This meant we didn't have to wear our uniforms and we could even bring in board games to play. Ann nearly didn't make the show on time as she was waiting upstairs and wondering why she was hot. Ste was back from Finland with tales of gin and grapefruit, Placebo and Finland's answer to Justin Bieber. Simon was still developing his next game after Bang Man! took the gaming world by storm. And thanks to our Super-Special Guest Ian Hamilton, Simon will be thinking of accessibility for gamers with disabilities. Ian was on to discuss the issues in improving accessibility and it seems that the little things matter a lot to most gamers. Annoyingly there's no actual legal enforcement to make games more accessible so most of the appetite to improve things is coming from the smaller companies. But we did find out which was the first AAA game with a dedicated blind accessibility option. Ann had a very important Ann

With Ste in Finland listening to Placebo and performing Marioke it meant that Simon and Ann were in the studio by themselves. Well, apart from the Super-Special Guests. And we got some amazing Super-Special Guests with Alex and Sean from Castle Magazine and Eddie Lee from Funktronic Labs coming into the studio. Alex and Sean were in to talk about Castle Magazine, which is due to launch in the first quarter of next year, providing that their crowdsourcing is successful and that they agree on how to correctly pronounce Castle. We had a look at their promotional postcards and queried their DPIs, before Ann got worried about what DPI stood for. Our other Super-Special Guest Eddie was a major test of where Simon's loyalties lie. You see Eddie's new game - Nova 111 - is being published by Curve digital, which is where Simon's second less-important job is. Would Simon give Eddie the usual OLL interview treatment or would he not even ask what colour his game was? We did find out that it's a turn-based real-time act

Unfortunately having to do three episodes in a row took its first victim as Simon took the week off. But he forgot to check this with HR and with his appraisal due this wasn't a good time to be doing this. Luckily our HR is an incredibly efficient department and managed to get a highly qualified Super-Special Guest Host in Tim Hibbs from the Big Red Barrel podcast. We highly recommend his podcast for those rare weeks when we haven't done a show (but if you listen any other time you'll go on The List). And in addition to our SSGH we also had a SSG! Kristian Andrews from Studio OwlBear came into the, er, studio to tell us about his game Barbara-Ian and to let out a Category C swear word. It's a Rogue-like (depending on the definition) based on a series of videos that Kristian sent to annoy Comedy Central/win a competition that Comedy Central had. We found out how Kristian had the idea to turn it into a video game and tried to come up with names for a sequel. Oh, and it's out on Friday! GameUnder told us of hi

We're still trying to solve the mystery that is sweeping the gaming world: Where did Marioke disappear to in July? And furthermore: When is it being held in August? Hopefully we'll get a little closer to the truth in this week's episode. Oh, and we did talk quite a bit about Her Story too, which made sense as this week's Super-Special Guest was its designer Sam Barlow. He came up on the sleeper from Portsmouth to tell us all about the game. Except for the plot. But hopefully you will understand from this episode that Her Story is a different type of game. The type of game that Simon dislikes, so what will he think of Her Story? Away from Her Story we found out that Simon looked a little different, Ann was beach body ready and Ste met some men on the Internet. Sega Badawi and GameUnder provided us with some features and we got onto the hot, hot topic of fans in consoles. Cheerio! Team OLL x Links: https://twitter.com/mrsambarlow http://www.herstorygame.com/ Track list: 1. Klamm - Rise http://chipmusic.org

OK, so the one week break turned into a two week break, but you can trust that One Life Left will never let you down again. Except for Marioke in July which we've had to cancel. And we'll be going on our summer holidays before too long. It's also pretty hot. Now, Team OLL are used to being hot, but this is an altogether different kind of hot. It's the type of hot that makes you have a can of Malibu and pineapple at the cricket and tricks you into thinking that your leggings will dry in time to go out. It's also the kind of hot where you reckon that hot and heat are words that are interchangeable. This week's show is rather cultured as our Super-Special Guests were Darren Wall from Read Only Memory and Alex Wiltshire from The Streets. They were in to promote ROM's first self-funded book Britsoft: An Oral History, which involved speaking to the major players in the British coding scene such as Jon Hare, Mel Croucher and Peter Moulinex. We also found out how you get Nintendo to give you two million dollars, tr

When Ste's away, Team OLL will play... chiptune covers of Muse songs. Yes, Ste was scouting out the karaoke bars of Gothenburg looking for talent to attend our Housemarque Marioke Birthday Celebration. This meant that Simon was in charge of the show. Unfortunately Simon immediately tells us that his shot his only child (with a Nerf gun) which means he probably isn't really responsible enough to run a radio show. Ann did recently become a triple Auntie so hopefully her instincts as an Aunt were enough to keep the show on track. Replacing Ste was our SSGH (Super-Special Guest Host) Simon 'Parkinson' Parkin. He brought the class and weird umlaut things that you'd expect from someone at the New Yorker. Parkinson also spoke a little about his new book, but we forgot to ask what colour it is. This is why we need Ste. But it wasn't just Parkinson, we also had Jack Attridge from Flavourworks on as a Super-Special Guest. He told us all about working at 22 Cans, what it was like to half-make Godus and showed Simon h

After another bank holiday break, One Life Left is back! Hopefully you all managed to cope without us. We all went to Nordic Game, then Ann and Simon went off to Copenhagen and then Simon went off to Barcelona. Team OLL always sticks together. This week's Super-Special Guest was Explosive Alan's Ash Denton. As you all know Team OLL has been trying to break into the YouTube/Twitch market for some time and we tried to find out from Ash the secret in monetising these areas. Apparently the secret is to make something that's unique and is actually rather good. So we're screwed then. Ash is also making the break into creating his own video game, it's all down to Mike Bithell. Which means it's all down to us. We also got pretty worried about our listeners as it took a while for us to get any letters from them, and then we got even more worried about Guy Cocker. Ste told us about his fetish for photos of carrots, Ann got a new tattoo and Simon discovered that Martin Hollis connects everyone from a photographic pers

It's a fairly open secret in the games 'industry' that One Life Left are the only King Makers worth dealing with. Mike Bithell's success is entirely down to us and console makers worldwide have a direct feed to the cupboard under Simon's stairs knowing that if their console ends up in there they can consider it to be finished. So we were pleased to welcome Laughing Jackal's Al Evans back to the studio to see how his game Flame Over has been doing, what new systems it might be moving across to and how we might best upset Rock Paper Shotgun on his behalf (to be honest we just needed the excuse). Simon was using his programming skills to try to hack Sony in order to get an Anniversary PS4, Ann started to make a game, Ste worried about his new talk and we all got concerned that we had upset GameUnder in some way. We never want to upset GameUnder. As usual Sega Badawi provided some Local News, but we had the welcome return of Derek Williams. We also spoke about our partners and family members (sorry partners and

It's not very often that all of Team OLL gets to meet up outside of the Resonance FM studio, so when we do you know it's going to be memorable. Except that Ste apparently forgot everything that happened at Ann's birthday party over the weekend. Listen to this week's show to hear him slowly piece together the unbelievable chain of events. Oh, but we do meet together every Third Thursday of the month to do Marioke, and the main enabler of this was this week's SSSG. We had James from the Loading bar in to go through our yearly Marioke appraisal. He also talked about the development of the Loading Bar, his favourite cocktail and made a request for a new Marioke song (that might have already been written between the show going out and this podcast being uploaded). Sega Badawi was the only contributor this week so we had to rely on Simon telling us how he single handedly got Nintendo back into profit, Ste telling us about how KP will single handedly bring England cricket back to the top and Ann telling us what ma

You can always guarantee that One Life Left never misses the chance to have a celebration. Except we forgot that this was our 250th episode, possibly because we've probably done more than 250 episodes due to spin-offs and literally unpodcastable episodes. However, we did celebrate in a way by having Jon and Joe from Inkle Studios in as our Super-Special Guests! They told us all about what it's like not winning a Bafta (it's rather similar to not winning a GMA), how Inkle is much better than Steve Jackson and how you make an open world book. Their new game Sorcery! 3 sounds rather excellent and will undoubtedly miss out on a Bafta next year. We also found out how Fearne Cotton is making extra pocket money by selling Xboxes, did some news near the end of the show, Ann went drinking, Ste and Simon played the same game and the letters section has been sponsored! By the company that Simon is joining next week. And we had the core contributing trio of Doctor Avatar, GameUnder and Sega Badawi. Cheerio! Team OLL x

One Life Left has always been a firm believer in helping the little guy out. It's why we've always applauded (quietly) when the GMA judges decided to give their podcast/radio show award those teams that aren't on FM. So we felt that having Holly and Kate from Toku Podcast on as our Super-Special Guests would be a good idea. We were wrong. They obviously hadn't learnt that if you wanted to become a success like Mike Bithell or the New Yorker's Simon 'Parkinson' Parkin then you needed to show us respect. Therefore this episode is a textbook example of how to ruin your career. (Although we're not sure if it's ours or theirs that is ruined) And the show started off started off so well. Simon took the risk of doing the show without headphones, Ste found a CD of filler music and Ann was recovering from having two roasts in one day. Then it went wrong. Ann started to tell a very sexy news story that rapidly turned out to be not particularly sexy - especially once Ste added in a contribution from Gogglebox. Then we

After a mini break for Easter, where we only ate Mini Eggs and Mini Milks, One Life Left is back! Ste had managed to break an egg exactly in half, Ann went outside and Simon helped gamify Easter and also met our thirteenth listener. Ann managed to break an exclusive, which is that she's highly likely to be a major character in the new Grand Theft Auto film that's coming out. Apparently only one third of the cinema seats will be available at the beginning of the film, which the rest of the cinema being unlocked as the film goes one. Our Super-Special Guest this week was Nitrome’s Aaron Steed. He told us all the gossip about Quinn's beginner Netrunner tournament (or BeQuinner tournament if you will) and how you identify which Flash games will work well on mobile. We also found out what are the main problems in creating a rogue like and how good we are at making Aaron forget the names of other good rogue likes. GameUnder provided more evidence of the corruption in videogames whilst Sega Badawi provided his Loc

It's been a while since we were last on Resonance FM, but you will have no doubt been keeping up to date with our adventures by listening to our GDC podcasts. But there are few things that we held back as we needed time to reflect on them. What was Simon offered to bump people up the Marioke queue? Why have we not been added to the list of E3 attendees? What was David Braben watching on the flight back? Only one of these questions will be slightly answered. We're just not a match for the journalistic integrity of the 3am girls. Our Super-Special Guest was someone who demanded we did improve our integrity as our regular contributor Gameunder came into the studio. He demanded to be able to disseminate how games could be made better, which game has caused all these problems in the industry and why Kieron Gillen is ultimately to blame. We also had a mini-report about the National Videogame Arcade and learnt how to play Virtua Tennis without looking at the screen. Doctor Avatar and Sega Badawi provided recorded

One Life Left vs Gamasutra GDC2015 Show #4   Recorded live from the Moscone's North Hall in San Francisco at GDC2015   Presented by Ste Curran, Cara Ellison and Kris Graft, with very special guests:   Kate Edwards (IGDA) Runa Haukland (Hamar Game Collective) Chris Gomez (Writer and Game Designer) Thomas Bidaux (ICO Partners) Matt Boch (Harmonix) Robert Yang (NYU) Tom Vian (SFB Games) Tadhg Kelly (Has a new book) Richard LeMarchand (ALL OUR THOUGHTS, ALL THE TIME)   That's it for 2015. See you next year! Or keep listening, because we do something (a bit) like this every week. Subscribe to One Life Left here: http://bit.ly/OLLtunes   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One Life Left vs Gamasutra GDC2015 Show #3   Recorded live from the Moscone's North Hall in San Francisco, live at GDC 2015, and featuring some NSFW industrial language.   Presented by Simon Byron, Ste Curran, Cara Ellison and (briefly) Christian Nutt, with very special guests:   John Walker (RPS) Frank Cifaldi (Other Ocean) Michael Consoli (Cartwheel Games) Chris Zukowski (Wizard Golf) Bennett Foddy (foddy.net) Trent Kusters (League of Geeks) Forrest Dowling (The Molasses Flood) John Ingold (Inkle) Joseph Humfrey (Inkle) Hannah Flynn (Failbetter) Alexis Kennedy (Failbetter) Rupert Meghnot (Burnout Game Ventures) Oscar Clark (Unity)   ONE AGAIN, THIS PODCAST CONTAINS QUITE A BIT OF SWEARING / CURSING. Apologies in advance. Our bleep button was broken.   s   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One Life Left vs Gamasutra GDC2015 Show #2   Recorded live from the Moscone's North Hall in San Francisco, live at GDC 2015.   Presented by Simon Byron, Ste Curran, Cara Ellison and Alex Wawro, with very special guests including:   Mike Bithell Rob Manuel Regner Blok-Andersen Jory Prum Gordon Midwood Kerry Turner Christy Marx Drew Murray Sarah Brin and more, more, MORE.   More tomorrow! Subscribe to One Life Left here: http://bit.ly/OLLtunes   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Recorded live from the Moscone's North Hall in San Francisco, live at GDC 2015.   Presented by Simon Byron, Ste Curran, Cara Ellison and Kris Graft, with very special guests:   Alex Fleetwood (Fabulous Beasts) Damon Shelton (Naughty Dog) Rami Ismail (Vlambeer) Steve Theodore (Undead Labs) Andrew Bennison (Prospect Games) James Parker (Ground Shatter) Teddy Diefenbach (Heart Machine) Nels Anderson (Campo Santo) Eline Muijres (Gameoven / Monogon Games)  Robert Curry (Dinosaur Polo Club)   More tomorrow! Subscribe to One Life Left here: http://bit.ly/OLLtunes   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices