This week we take a look at cosplay; the act of dressing up like a character from a video game or anime. To get the most out of the subject we brought in long-time cosplay veteran Adella, also known as Sarah Quillian who has constructed over thirty cosplays for herself and others over the years and amassed her own community as a result.

Her site and pictures of her in her many many outfits can be found here.

Her Zelda Project is here.

And I’ll be posting up more pictures of things we mention in the show in the next few days.

It may seem a little girly at first, but stick with us. This young lady has an immense passion for what she does and as always we find that fascinating.

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This week we’re doing a tribute episode to Britains most long-lived and loved  TV news quiz; Have I Got News For You. American listeners may be a little confused but bear with us.

Our guests are…

James Batchelor of Gameburst

Dits Symeou of TGS

And David Turner of Joypod

If you guys enjoy hearing this as much as we enjoyed recording it, then we’ll do more.

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If you loved it,

If you hated it,

If you’re curious…

You have to listen.

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We are joined this week by Karl Moon also known as Nokkonwud to discuss one of his most anticipated games of all time; Alan Wake. Five years in production, even longer in development, was it worth the wait?

Before that we briefly discuss Bioshock 2 and why, like Kill Bill Vol. 2 it’s superior to the first, and definitely an essential play for 2010.

Then commences a ninety minute dissection of Psychological Action Thriller Alan Wake. Find out who liked it, who loved it and who had a pile of issues with it.

There are light spoilers throughout so avoid if you want to remain totally in the dark. The tail end of the show is a heavy spoiler section where we discuss the end.

However you feel about the game, somebody is going to agree with you.

Many thanks to Karl for guesting this week. You can follow him on Twitter here.

And Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace can be found here.

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This is the second part of our Kill Bill special. We had originally intended to publish it as a single two-hour podcast but we felt that it would be better paced and more focused to divide it into two with a short wait between episodes.

In this part, Alex and Sharon lay down their reasoning as to why Kill Bill Vol. 2 is actually better than the first.

Once again, major spoilers and do make sure you’ve listened to part one first or this will make less sense.

And if you like this format, check out the Fight Club episode that we recorded last year.

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The Neo Geo and Home Arcade Cabinets.

To explore the ups and downs of the most expensive and exclusive 16-Bit machine ever made I recruited our good friend, retro-games expert, our wise and carmudgeonly web-master; Commander Tim of The Widget.

We discuss my discovery of the library of games that had until fairly recently been relegated to ropey ports on other systems and the occasional decent compilation. Now with a large amount of games legitimately available on the Wii, PS2 and 360 to thosew who know where to look it’s time to discover those titles you couldn’t justify spending £200 on when you were fourteen.

To follow up, we discuss the tricky, expensive but occasionally massively rewarding business of getting an arcade cabinet for your home. It soon becomes a culture-shock investigation into my massive invidiousness for Tim’s homeland, where apparently the streets are paved with free vintage arcade machines.

The best value for money MAME-compatible units I found in the UK were available here at Turnarcade.

The high-end models for the decidedly wealthy are to be found here at Bespoke Arcades.

And finally, you can hear more from Tim on The Widget Show.

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Digital Cowboys Film Club makes it’s triumphant return (Our Fight Club episode was released last August) and this one features my wife Sharon and I deconstructing Kill Bil Volume 1. The second part will be next week.

Obviously it contains major spoilers so if you’ve never seen Kill Bill you should avoid it for now. We go deep on speculation and the lore of Tarantino’s universe so you may just learn something new about this Samurai-Western tale of bloody revenge.

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Packaging Complexity.

We are joined by Sinan Kubba and Gary Blower of Big Red Potion this week to discuss the weighty and fairly fascinating issue of how developers go about sellling us complex games.

It’s harder than it might appear making something like Age of Empires play like Peggle.

What have been the best ways to attract the bigger audiences and which games have actively benefitted from being streamlined.

Find out which Final Fantasy had the best storytelling, how important Tetris is and which one of us habitually uses a Poke-Walker.

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Here is an honest account of everything I have learned about the real world through playing video games.

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Back in MY day!

This week we’re in full old git mode, and looking back on how things were in the gaming scene in the golden days of our youth. And we’re not just voicing our own experiences, we have a thread-load of memories submitted by our community.

And who better to look back on the archaic tech and monocoloured graphics of old than Chris “Kropotkin” O Regan from Silverhound Productions and The Superhappyfuntimeshow.

As usual, the conclusions we eventually reached were rather unexpected.

And stay tuned at the end for a series of special birthday messages for Tony recorded by some of the best a brightest indy podcasters as well as a bunch of loyal forumites.

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