From Bedrooms To Billions Special Edition

Sven Harvey takes a look at the documentary film

Funded by a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, From Bedrooms to Billions is a documentary film charting (primarily) the founding of the computer game industry here in the United Kingdom and showing how it led the world, prior to the switch to it being a videogames industry instead.

The documentary is mainly made up of talking head footage made up of excerpts from interviews with some of the pioneers of the British industry, conducted especially for the film. The interview snippets are constructed together into time frame segments (for instance all the parts of the conversations about the Sinclair ZX Spectrum are together) and intermixed with some vintage footage, advert scans and even newspaper clippings.

The Evolution Of Radio. How FM’s Future Is Fading

Mark Oakley looks at how the digital switchover has begun

Norway is a beautiful country. We’ve not actually visited it, you understand, but we’ve seen pictures, watched videos and concluded that Norway is indeed a beautiful country. According to the Visit Norway website, it’s famous for its fjords – with two featuring on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The weather is much milder than you might expect, trolls are an important part of its folklore, and it apparently has an indigenous blue parrot (at least according to Monty Python).

The Alternative ISP Guide

The consolidation of the UK Broadband market in the last six or seven years has left us with four major suppliers, and a dearth of choice, but there are alternatives out there...

The ISP market might be bigger business than ever, but if you’re a consumer it often feels as though it’s shrunk. During the days of dial-up it seemed like everyone used a different service provider, whereas now it seems to be one of a few big telecoms or media companies, many of whom aren’t exactly famed for their low prices or good customer service.

So are there any better alternatives out there, or have the big companies hoovered up the competition’s users with good reason? Let’s try to find out.

The Pursuit Of Music Perfection

Roland Waddilove shows where you can download lossless studio-quality audio files and hear music the way the artists performed it

How good is the music you listen to? This is not a question about your favourite artist, whoever that may be, but the quality of the audio. You might think that the music you listen to sounds okay, but it’s surprising how poor most music is. You would be amazed at the difference if you heard how music really sounds.

For some people, only the best quality music is acceptable, and they want to hear it like they were in the same room as the singer or musician. The pursuit of music perfection has two components: the physical equipment the music is played on and the quality of the audio itself.

Orphan

When war of the worlds collide

The end of the world is nigh. Again. Humanity is under attack once more, and unfortunately Orphan doesn’t put you in the boots of a muscular gunman, or even a wise-cracking idiot with a baseball bat. Instead you’re tasked with looking after a young boy who might just be the sole survivor of an overnight alien invasion.

Yoshi’s Woolly World

Balls to the wool with Nintendo’s adorable adventure

Oh no! Renowned rotter Kamek has just stuffed all the Yoshis on Craft Island into a sack for literally no reason. Thankfully he’s forgotten the green and best one, which is lucky since he’s on the box and everything. Now it’s Yoshi’s dino duty to find his friends and stitch the colourful clan back together. You don’t want to know what happens ‘or else’.

Everybody’s gone to the rapture

But we’re kind of glad we got left behind…

We all have a local, a drinking house that serves up the requisite beverages, pies, chips, and good times to stave off the dullness of just tottering home after work and plonking down in front of the TV. There’s nothing quite so cheering, nor as British, as necking some ale with pals, lobbing pointy sticks at cork on the wall, or letting the little ones leg it about a beer garden while you shelter under a parasol gossiping about your neighbours.

Guitar Hero Live

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 2005

It was never just a game. As much as it feels like we’re falling in line with an Activision press release to say it, during the years of Guitar Hero’s glory it was a genuine phenomenon. Your parents knew about it. TV shows parodied it. Ham-fisted renditions of I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll became as synonymous with your pre-night out routine as your mate Dodgy Luke’s hip flask of Ribena and Aftershock.

And it’ll never be that again. Guitar Hero flew too close to the sun, saturating the market (with help from EA’s competitor, Rock Band) and stuffing us all to the gills with its note streaks. Even with that in mind, we’re… actually pretty excited about Guitar Hero live.