Puppet Pals - Interview with Polished Play

Stop motion animation can be a lot of fun; there’s always something magical about seeing inanimate objects move seemingly by themselves. But there’s one major inherent problem with this creative endeavour: it’s a painfully slow process - assuming you work in PAL, you must move your objects and characters a little bit at a time, recording the process twenty-five time just to produce one second of video. The results are often worth it, of course, but it’s definitely an exercise in patience. This is where Lance Harris and Heber Sheffield, the founders of Polished Play come in; they created a set of apps for iPad to turn this process upside down and enable anyone to create animated scenes in minutes, rather than days.

Leo's Fortune - Interview with 1337 & Senri

Leo's gold has gone missing. The thief has left a trail of coins like breadcrumbs to tease him into finding his hoard again, and thus begins the premise of this original game from 1337 & Senri.

Leo himself is a beautifully rendered ball of blue/green fur - with a large moustache and an Eastern European accent. You make him move to the left and right by dragging your finger on the left side of the screen, while the right side controls his up and down movement. Like a puffer fish, Leo can make himself bigger, which enables him to float and avoid obstacles, or slow down his fall. All of this is extremely well demonstrated in the tutorial.

Axl and Tuna - Interview with Game Collage

It's been two and a half years since Bobo leapt onto the scene and delighted numerous iPad owners and their children with its wonderful educational adventures and charmingly quirky personality, effortlessly teaching kids all about the mysteries of light.

But Game Collage haven't been idle since: they've been working on a game which they're releasing today called Axl and Tuna and I spoke to Juraj Hlaváč, developer of the two-man team that created this latest endless runner.

Monument Valley - Interview with Ustwo

We keep hearing bleak news when it comes to the App Store; what was once a thriving and exciting revolution is giving way to "me too" apps, poor clones of successful games and a cataclysmic avalanche of "freemium" games based on grabbing as much money out of you or your children as possible through the highly deceptive use of in-app purchases.

But every now and again, something surprises and delights you, and reminds you that games are meant to give players pleasure, not frustration. Monument Valley does exactly that.

Oceanhorn - Interview with Cornfox & Bros

Creating a game is no easy task; Forge Reply for instance, had a team of fifteen working on the excellent Joe Dever's Lone Wolf, so it's pretty remarkable that three people set about creating and designing a vast, ambitious game of adventure and exploration for iOS called "Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas".

Joe Dever's Lone Wolf - Interview

Back in the early 80s, personal computing was still in its infancy, games were amazing for the time, yet primitive by today's standards and couldn't hope to match what we could imagine in our own heads. Perhaps because of this, a type of book became incredibly popular, one where you could choose how he story developed by making decisions for the protagonist as you read. Those decisions led you to read certain paragraphs and not others, making the story unfold differently, depending on those choices. Many series were created, but one of the most successful was based on the character of Lone Wolf, with its riveting ongoing narrative that linked all the books together, while the character developed and progressed throughout the saga. You played Lone Wolf, last of the Kai - warrior monks sworn to protect their homeland, Sommerlund, against the armies of the Dark Lords.

ANM Interviews Oi! Conference 2013

This year's Oi! Conference at the Cardiff Marriott Hotel, had a special flavour about it. Not only did it feature the awesome speakers Mark Schaefer, Philippa Davies, Ian Cleary, a hefty panel and a very enthusiastic audience, but it was also firmly weighted towards inclusivity and the social element of the social web. Roll on 2014.

ANM interviews Bruce Robertson

As a student, Bruce Robertson had a problem understanding philosophy, so he spent the following decades refining his knowledge and recently published a book which is the culmination of his work: "The Pattern Paradign: the Science of Philosophy"

Live on Prime Time TV

It's not every day you appear live on prime time television, on New Zealand's biggest channel, TV1.

Interviewing Harry Fear

Harry Fear is a young independent journalist whose recent claim to fame are his reports from Gaza, including his experience of the recent war.

He's touring the world at the moment, helping to spread awareness of the situation, and Angel and I caught up with him before his talk.

MacLife Interview: Restoring the Lost Interview with Steve Jobs

My interview with Robert X Cringely and Sean Varah has been published on Mac Life’s website.

Check it out