One Life Left — s04e22 — #94 — Ha Ha Bonk
What goes ha ha bonk? That’s right, it’s the sound of the OLL team laughing their heads off at this week’s guest: comedy writer, stand-up performer and irreligious troll Christina Martin! Also, Ann and Simon giggling as Ste bangs his face on his mic again. Either way (both ways, actually) it’s OLL #94!
Look, we’re twenty-two episodes into this season and you should really know the drill by now. We can probably be a bit less formal. Maybe even try bullet points. Ninety-four features the following things, in no particular order:
News. Reviews. Music. Obviously.
TWO brilliant, brilliant, exclusive, exclusive new songs.
Discussion including – but not limited to – Christian game reviews, The King of Kong, and a comprehensive answer to the question, “Are university games courses worth the effort?”
Sorry about the delay to the podcast. The team are feeling a bit under the weather this week but hope to have their collective health back together for next week’s penultimate episode of season 4. What happens after that? The last one, of course. Duh. See you!
Songs in #94:
Skins Theme Remix by Pandotrix
Red Flowers by Hurrigame Boy
Talking to Animals by Swampyboy
(It’s possible one of these didn’t make it onto the podcast because of TECHNICAL ISSUES but if you’re curious they’re all available at the brilliant 8bitcollective website).
Download the show as an MP3 here.
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One Life Left — s04e21 — #93 — EU/AU
Desk checked: check. Guests checked: check. Live in three… two… one…
Oops. With Ste in America selling the rights to USA Life Left, it’s down to Simon and Ann to hold the show together. But following an anarchic Bike Show, there’s little time. It’s fair to say there are more errors with the desk in the first 10 minutes than the first 10 minutes of any show. But we muddle through as only One Life Left knows how: poorly.
Joined by Eurogamer editor Tom Bramwell and a genuine, actual One Listener Left from the other side of the world, it’s kind-of business as usual: if the usual is a broken studio recorder (thanks for saving the show, Derek Williams!), friendly racism, and quite a lot of actual chat about videogames and that.
Features include Derek Williams (thanks!), Mathew Kumar (thanks!) and a special As Seen On TV (hmmm), but the highlight has to be three-and-a-half minutes of Craig “The Rage”. Astonishing stuff, which’ll long be remembered after the theme rolls.
Music includes: something from Street Fighter II (or III) HD Turbo Nutter Graphics Edition, a brilliant reader-submitted song, and a dance remix of the Marble Madness theme.
Join us next week when we’ll be welcoming yet another SuperGuest. And the return of Ste, who’ll no doubt have a go at us for not making up an icon or nothing when we were only doing our best, which is patently not good enough.
Hats off!
(PS: Massive, massive thanks to Derek Williams who’s tirelessly pieced together bits from an intermittent feed to ensure this appears in your ears in some capacity. As such, the quality varies – the Internet’s fault, not Derek’s – but it’s uploaded here because surely it’s better than not being uploaded here at all. Thanks Derek!)
team@onelifeleft.com
Download here innit. Play below.
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One Life Left — s04e20 — #92 — Tan Man
Just… a… few… minutes… more…
Nope, that’s enough waiting – after an extended, weather-enforced hiatus, TEAM OLL is back, back, back, BACK!
Wait! Back, back, back, BACK!?
Yep, four backs – and three tits – in the studio this week, as we continue our series of SuperGuests by welcoming Leo Tan, the Best Man At Street Fighter In The Country, to the warm and cosy confines of Resonance FM HQ.
(Incidentally, does anyone know if The Bike Show made it in to work last week? We bet they did, the swots. We were too busy rolling round in the snow and putting carrots in the middle of snowmen to bother turning up to the office.)
Laugh! As we, um…
Cry! As we, err…
Groove! As we, well…
WHO CARES what’s in the show? Plug your earphones in, kick back, and relax as we entertain in the way only we know how: not very well. Enjoy!
(NB: Simon here. I thought Ste was going to put this up, but he’s gone to America. I don’t know whether he intended to, and no doubt I’ve buggered up bits of it, but I thought it best we get this delivered to your iTunze ay-ass-ay-pee, what with the fact we weren’t on air last week. He’ll shout at me when he returns. He’s like that. It’s why I wear makeup and long sleeves. But he’s not back for 10 days or so. Next week, it’ll be just me and Ann and no SuperGuest so please, please, please send letters, jokes, features and songs to team@onelifeleft.com. Thankyouloveyou. X)
Songs in this episode:
#1: Some. I can’t remember. I’m sure Ste says what they are.
#2: See above.
Download here.
Play here: OLL_S04e20.mp3
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Free Market Economy – A Week In Review
Or something.N ow thoroughly bored with my chart feature which was going nowhere and bored me, I’ve decided to try something a bit different which will more than likely go nowhere in a similar manner and but hopefully be less boring. So in the spirit of the Ramones; hey ho let’s go.
Saturday:
Didn’t work as I was in The Game City that is Nottingham, meeting loyOLL (good grief! – everyone) fans Down Home Kitty and Kevin. I have to say, for a place claiming to be Game City, I didn’t see many game shops. Cex and Game is obviously not enough. Even went to the market there and there’s no Nottingham Free Market Economists. Peculiar. Clearly they need to be stripped of the title so that Doncaster can quite rightly lay its claim to the title. Also somehow it seems I entered my own competition from an email address I registered specially. I don’t remember doing this but derekfme at googlemail does now exist.
Monday:
It snowed. Lots. I worked and took no money. Sold no games. Went and built snowmen instead.
Tuesday and Wednesday:
Business Partner works these days. He took hardly any money, sold very few games and bought hardly any in. I moaned a lot about the snow melting away already.
Thursday
Back to work and it’s snowing again. Typical. Still after a few hours of being frozen and selling nothing I give up on the stall and decide to go out building snowmen instead.
Today:
Bought in a Wii, A white DS with a Catz and er something else I’ve forgotten, Far Cry 2, Guitar Hero 2, Left4Dead all for the 360, Saints Row 2 PS3 and a PS2 original with about 8 games including UFC Throwdown and Red Dead Revolver. I sold Medal of Honour Rising Sun, Sonic Heroes PS2, Football Manager 2007 360. I’m now sold out of Football Manager 2007 despite having loads of them a week or two ago. I could swear they’ve all been bought by the same customer but I’m sure I must be going mad. All customers look the same to me anyway. I listed Saints Row 2 online with my stock now being saturated with it by having two of them. I’ve had one for sale at £20 on the stall for about a month but no takers. It’s already sold online at £18.50 + £1.99 postage. I got a spare Wiimote and Nunchuck with the Wii and the Wiimote has sold online at about £23 + £1.99 as well. Which gets back some of the huge amount of money I spent today. I’m dumping pretty much everything online lately. It’s the only place things are selling. Helps that I sell internationally, thus hugely increasing my customer base. IT’s not always easy to buy things in from people at profitable price to sell online with all the other shops in the area having much higher retail prices and buy in prices.
You know, my takings are so low that I didn’t have enough money to pay the stall rent for the first time ever. That wouldn’t be so bad if I could have got some money out of the bank but my account was hacked this week and some lovely people tried taking out £250 to Barclaycard followed by a couple of smaller transactions to Capital One. Thankfully my bank was on the ball and stopped the transactions and blocked my account. But I’ve got to wait 7-10 days for a new card.
I hear on the news just now that Blizzard are creating havoc across the country. Must be some new PR stunt for World of Warcraft. As if that horrible brown filled time sink needs any more players.
Also if you fancy some realtime updates of what’s happening in the world of the Free Market Economist, you can follow my twittering at http://twitter.com/derekfme
Funny Money
A couple of posts down, before a bit of weather happened, I wrote to the Bank of England on behalf of everyone who’s interested in games and finance and mischief. I thought at best I’d be ignored. At worst, I expected a big telling off for wasting bank time. Is that a crime? It should be.
But no! The Bank of England, the people in charge of all the money in this little country, took time out of their day to email me about a curious videogame. And here is what they said:
Hello
Thank you for your e-mail on this matter.
With regard to the UK, you may be interested to know that the wholesale distribution & circulation of Bank of England banknotes is managed under the Note Circulation Scheme, which promotes the processing and distribution of notes by the commercial sector. More can be read about this at:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/about/distribution_circulation.htm
In the case that you highlight, however, one is talking in hypothetical terms about a galaxy that exists only in the abstract. In such a scenario, it is therefore impossible to quantify the economic effects that might, or might not, be felt in a virtual world by taking a large quantity of ‘interstellar currency’ out of circulation.
Kind regards
Public Information and Enquiries Group
Please note that my initial email mentioned nothing about a galaxy (because I’m a bit sketchy about that bit of EVE, the bit about where it is) so someone’s either done some good Googling or I have been replied to by an EVEite! If you are a player, keep track of your interest rates – you don’t know who might be round the corner waiting to slash them.
Well done The Bank of England, you responded and it wasn’t to tell me that I am now being monitored by MI5. Still no idea about the iminent collapse of EVE’s financial community. Oh well!
We’re snow sorry
When it snows the world stops.
Or at least the tubes, trains and buses in London do. And that’s bad news for teamatonelifeleft who travel from all four (three) corners of the globe to make Europe’s only FM broadcasting videogame radio show. The snow stopped the FM broadcast, which means it stopped the internet podcast. There is only one way to sum this up.
And sorry. Really sorry. Mostly sorry because we had an amazing guest lined up for tonight.
It’s Cliff Snow-Bliszard-Zinski!
Again, sorry. But we’ll be back next week! And maybe we’ll have better snow based game related name puns. Probably not though, right?
It’s been nice snowing you!
A question of money
When you have a question about money, who do you go to?
Dear The Bank of England,
Hello. How are you?
I don’t know much about money, but I have a money question and you seem to be a good place to go to with money questions.
I heard a story the other day about a man who worked for a bank and ran off with a lot of money from the bank. This bank existed only in a virtual world called EVE (it’s a videogame or something) and the money that he stole wasn’t in pounds Stirling or dollars, it was in ISK (Inter Stella Currency – I know, I had to look it up too).
You’re probably wondering why I’m asking you about money that doesn’t actual exist, but here’s the thing – you make money, and you probably get quite annoyed when people destroy it and take it out of circulation, because that screws things up for you. That’s what this man has done! He has taken 86 billion ISK out of circulation in EVE! And he made a joke about it! And that’s a bit like what all the bankers did who made people think there was loads of money when there wasn’t, and once people realised that there was loads less money people started calling it an economic crisis.
Anyway, my question is: Do you think the potential economic crisis in EVE is going to be as disastrous as the one in the real world? Do you have any tips for the people in EVE to make sure things don’t go quite as badly as they have done here?
Thanks for your help.
Keep banking!
Ann
I’m pretty certain they don’t have much else on at the minute, so I’m expecting a speedy response.