firehose

Well, it only took several statements from showrunner Steven Moffat saying that women don’t want the job, or talking about his “folder of women,” Neil Gaiman calling the show out, and the long-overdue hiring of Catherine Tregenna to start a veritable trend of hiring women to write on Doctor Who! This time, it’s Sarah Dollard! Check out her understandable giddiness about writing for the franchise in the video interview above!

Dollard will be writing Episode 10 of Series 9; this after a career that includes writing on Being Human and the BBC’s acclaimed spy drama, The Game. Dollard says:

Getting to play in the Doctor Who toy box is a dream come true. It’s a total honour to contribute to a show that has brought me such joy as a fan. However, writing for Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman has presented a serious problem: some days I’ve been too excited to actually sit down and type!

Wait… so is she telling us that… Doctor Who has female fans? Female fans who write? And who would love nothing more than to write for the show? THAT’S CRAZY! Someone should tell Steven Moffat!

With Hettie MacDonald directing the first two episodes of the season – “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar” – and two female writers contributing episodes, Doctor Who is getting a little closer to parity.

Now, the next test: Will the same female writer ever come back and write a second episode the way Toby Whithouse, or Peter Harness, or Mark Gatiss continually contribute multiple episodes? Time (travel) will tell.

(via Doctor Who on YouTube)

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The judge's opinion came after activists used an obscure Ohio law to bypass prosecutors. 

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By the way, if you think it's completely nonsensical that people could be smoking and growing and giving friends legal weed next month, but still suffer for doing some of the same stuff in the past, maybe stop by the Bus Project this evening.

The organization's teamed up with New Approach Oregon, and is trying to wrangle volunteers to call down to Salem and convince legislators to support an amendment that would allow people to expunge their records of pot possession, delivery, and manufacture laws.

The push relates to a chief selling point of last year's Measure 91: minorities have disproportionately cited for pot crimes in this state. As of now, that history won't be erased by the law that takes effect July 1.

The Bus Project's at 333 SE 2nd. Be there at 5:30 pm if you'd like to help.

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The FTC imposes a fine on a board game creator who failed to deliver their Kickstarter.

Developers publicly wring their hands about the reports of high refund rates on Steam.

Everyone looks to VR, but there’s already people asking whether it is a bubble.

What’s going on?

There are two business models: sell something in advance using promises, and persuade a lot of people who might not like a product a lot; or give the product cheaply and charge after the fact.

Here are some basic facts of life regarding these two models.

Selling in advance relies on persuading people who aren’t actually a great fit for the product that it is the best thing for them. This is the model that packaged goods have always used. The fact is that any given product is only perfect for a small percentage of its actual audience. Most of the others are more like 80% fits, or occasional users, or whatever. Few people need to buy a wood chipper; it’s smarter to rent one. Few people need to buy most things, actually.

The cheap to free model relies on the idea that you can give the product to a zillion people, and then get from them the amount of money they are actually willing to spend. It has the wonderful virtue that you get to extract small dollar amounts from people below the price sensitivity threshold of the packaged goods price. It has also revealed, in games anyway, that in practice, 95-99% of people think your game isn’t worth anything even if they play it every day. This model inevitably leads towards service businesses.

Of course, these two broad methods have a lot of gray area in between them. You have to sell people in advance on the idea of even trying your free product, for example. (If you want to learn more about how to “sell in advance” (which is also known as “marketing”) you can read this post of mine here.) Or, in the case of service businesses, we quickly find bundles and packages and service tiers, a way to sort of sneak in aspects of the packaged goods model into the other model. Either way, though, the pure fact is that capitalism often depends on getting people to pay for stuff they don’t really need.

To protect consumers, the “sell in advance” model typically offers refunds. However, refunds are often not available for goods which are consumed, easily copied, etc. It varies by jurisdiction. One doesn’t return a book, for example, because they didn’t like it. (There’s much chatter about Steam’s new policy being driven by the new EU rule on being able to “withdraw” from digital purchases within 14 days, but that’s actually a somewhat muddled thing and not as straightforward as “you can do refunds for 14 days, no questions asked.”)

The “sell for a price” business model learned over time that demos reduce sales. This may be because people find that they don’t like the game. It may also be because the typical player just doesn’t play a given game for very long. Metrics showed years ago that any AAA game longer than around eight hours was hugely overspending in content for the typical user, for example. This is why games started getting shorter.

Particularly narrative games, of course. Games with narrative have become, in aggregate, the largest segment of AAA. (Most all the FPS, action-adventure, and RPG categories are linear story games now, for a bunch of reasons which I recently wrote about).

As narrative games have grown, of course, some people have stories to tell that are by nature short. This is an artistic freedom thing, and also a response to changing markets that have, as technology has grown ubiquitous, made games accessible in really short sessions. One can debate pricing, of course, but…

In general, the industry has seen massive downwards price pressure. This pressure has hit mobile first, with the race to zero as the price point. The typical pay upfront game simply fails, period. Often regardless of quality, because the market is so glutted with free content that players don’t need to pay upfront for anything, really. At the same time, costs for quality, competitive content has risen as the market matures. (Costs at the low end haven’t, they’ve fallen. But basically, everything I wrote in this piece from ten years ago is still valid, and quite a lot of the predictions came true):

• The cost to consumers for a minute of content has been dropping steadily over time
• The cost to create and package a minute of content has been rising steadily over time.

…If there’s one thing that the Web makes possible, it’s enough content to make the typical content creator superfluous. Oh, plenty of people will be willing to play, read, or hear their content. The question isn’t whether they can find an audience — on the Internet, everyone can find an audience. No, the question is whether all forms of fixed content will effectively be donations to the common weal.

(For a more modern summary of the same phenomenon, try this excellent article here.) One result of this price pressure is the move to free to play. Without it, the median mobile game makes zero in revenue. A game that would have cost anywhere from $15 to $60 not long ago, like say a puzzle game, is now free or 99 cents.

Steam has been a bastion of higher prices that actually pay for development costs. That said, it has also experienced downwards price pressure, though less. The Steam sale’s about to start. We all know how that goes. If Steam succumbs to the same trend as mobile, the only financially viable games will be the free to play ones and the genres that fit that model.

This is all a natural business evolution, and dev, pubs, and yes, players, are all complicit in it.

That said, the reason devs are worried by the refunds is because there are many verified reports of refunds being given for games played

• for longer than two hours
• for longer than two weeks

This might just be a shakedown period though. So there is a lot of wait and see going on. Reports between devs to date do in fact have lots of cases of 30% returns cited as a figure (which to be clear, is a recipe for bankruptcy), but there are also others saying they haven’t seen an impact.

Lastly, the concern about people demanding refunds for short games is a very real fear. Or for games that they just didn’t like. Refunds for disliking content as opposed to lack of functionality (like say, not working on your computer) is new territory for the industry as a whole. It definitely undermines the “upfront sale” model fairly dramatically if the percentage turns out to be more than a couple of percentage points.

A lot of devs do not want to move to free to play models. They see it as a far greater threat to ethical and creative game design than most anything else. So high refund rates combined with rapidly rising budgets and downwards price pressure raises a lot of fears about margins and sustainability.

For many, the way in which they thought they could evade this and go straight to the “thousand true fans” was to use Kickstarter. Kickstarter basically is a way to reach the (relatively few) people who do actually love your product idea, and do pre-sales on them so that you can build it in the first place rather than financing it out of pocket. All of the marketing costs remain intact. Basically, it means Kickstarter is strongly tilted towards “incumbents” of various stripes. Worse, we see some of the remaining “sell in advance” companies using Kickstarter as market validation before taking on publishing roles.

And of course, there’s that whole “risks” section. Kickstarter lets you pre-order so far in advance that the risk is always very high. It turns out that a lot of consumers don’t like these risks. The way-early reveals are basically showing the world how much gets cut from a typical game product, and all of a sudden it seems like you’re getting ripped off. In some cases, you might be.

So everyone turns their eyes towards a new step in the lifecycle: a new platform. Sure, plenty of people are excited by VR because of its promise in terms of creativity, immersion, and plain technological coolness. But… Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about a device that

• requires a PC fewer and fewer people have, and can’t use the PCs most people are getting (laptops)
• has a relatively high dev barrier to entry to make content that doesn’t cause actual physical illness
• cannot run the sort of content the people who have high end PCs want (high-speed visceral content) because it causes actual physical illness
• causes actual physical illness in an apparently irreducible substantial fraction of the population
• is being marketed around a standing experience that has serious risk of serious bodily harm and requires a large empty space few consumers have
• requires mass market adoption to succeed
• is actually best experienced sitting down watching a movie

I think it’s fair to make the case that the message is muddled, and I say that as someone who is a believer in VR!

Two clearer messages:

1. “this is a high end luxury thing for core gamers with non-traditional tastes, and someday it will lead to something cooler.”
2. “This is a mass market device for the best movie-watching and virtual tour/visit experience EVAR.”

This article comparing VR to swimming pools was suggesting message #1. I think message #2 is probably more honest in some ways, but it of course alienates the early adopters who are driving the tech — and the path to the mass market lies through them.

In either case, though, it doesn’t look to me, at least, like the new platform is going to reset development costs by a large enough degree to make it a green field for low-end development.

So what happens in maturing markets? Well, smart distributors find ways to keep their top content providers hungry and their top charts varied by engaging in ever-heavier curatorial practices. Unsurprisingly, Apple just switched their App Store to a much more curated model. Curation has biases too: personal relationships, whatever favors the platform owner’s marketing story, high budget and polish.

So where does it leave us?

Refunds aren’t a bad thing. Devs are right to be concerned until there’s more data. Steam is probably watching their data very closely. The race to zero continues. The market value of entertainment continues to fall. A lot of small or midsize devs are going to fold or be bought. I don’t see a platform shift that saves the low end anytime soon. This also means now’s the right time to be building personal audience connections and the skills that go with it. And to learn to run very lean. Or alternatively, to go pile up large buckets of money from some source and shoot bigger: right now, money can be had, for the right dream. Oh, and master the service skills, because the sell-in-advance model is looking sickly. And the marketing skills, so you can persuade the curators you are worthy, because we are basically back to an editorially controlled world.

It’s easy to read change as negative. But change is change. If anything, the new landscape probably makes many folks who are more comfortable in the big business side of things very happy, just because it’s a familiar landscape.

unsounded:

Engineers…

mialayla:

mialayla:

I love my job

I lost my job

Come on, Kanye!

Finding a smile from Kanye is like finding a needle in a haystack. Once again, Kanye was having fun at an NBA game but didn't want to let us see it.

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

It has been a while since I last wrote about a new game I've played. I do have quite a few new-to-me games to write about, just that I have a rather long backlog to catch up on - old games played, new games played, fun experiences, photos taken. Since I'm itching to write about something new, I'll let Madame Ching cut queue.

Madame Ching is about a famous Chinese pirate Mrs Zheng who lived during the Qing Dynasty. You are her followers vying to outdo one another in leading raids, and your objective is to win the most glory to become her right-hand man.

The basic mechanism is quite simple. You have four navigation cards in hand. Every round everyone secretly picks a card and reveals it simultaneously. Then in order from lowest to highest card, you add it to a row of cards in front of you. This row of cards represents your current raiding voyage. Cards must be played in ascending order. When you add a higher card to the row, you continue your voyage. When you play a card which cannot be added to the row, you complete your current voyage and start a new one with that card. After that you pick one of the cards displayed on the board to be added to your hand. So every round is basically playing a card and drawing a card.

When you complete a voyage, you gain something. Every space on the board has a voyage value. Depending on where your ship ends its voyage, you get to claim a mission tile, which is worth victory points (in the form of coins or gems) and sometimes gives you bonus cards (called encounter cards) too. The game ends when all mission tiles are claimed. There are two other things you may gain from your voyages. Some navigation cards have skill symbols, and if your voyage cards contain specific combinations of these symbols, you get to claim a skill card. Skill cards give powerful special abilities. If you collect all four types of skill cards, Madame will promote you to captain of her flagship, the China Pearl (you get 5VP), and the game will end.

The other big reward is the 10VP for raiding Hong Kong. When sailing, you sail either to the right or to the lower right. Sailing to the lower right is usually more lucrative because the voyage value increases more quickly. To do so, you need to play a card of a colour which is new to your voyage row. To reach Hong Kong, which is at the lower right corner of the board, you need to have collected and played cards of 7 different colours, which is no easy feat.

The gameplay is all around embarking on voyage after voyage, and you try to make the most from every raiding expedition. You also need to plan which reward to go for, and when.

The two spaces at the top left are for the navigation card discard pile and draw deck. The two spaces at the top right are for the encounter card draw deck and discard pile. The four spaces between these are for the replenishment cards for the current round. The square tiles at the bottom are the mission tiles. Not all mission tiles will be in use in every game, so there will be some variety from game to game.

The three cards on the right are the navigation cards. The full number range is 1 to 55, and for each smaller range within there is a specific colour. The three cards on the left are encounter cards (bonus cards).

My current voyage has five cards. I have two kite symbols and two lantern symbols. If I can get a third symbol for either kite or lantern, I would be able to claim a skill card.

The Play

I did a four-player game with Dith, Vence and Sinbad. That's the max player count, and I think it is the best way to play. The game plays very smoothly, since every round is simple. You rarely get to directly interfere with others' voyages, but there is still much player interaction in picking cards. Sometimes you want to play a smaller card just so that you can go earlier and pick a card you want. There is an interesting pacing element. If you can adjust your tempo to be opposite of your opponents, e.g. you want lower cards when they want higher ones, you will face less competition. The nature of the competition is the who-will-get-which-first type. There are many rewards to go after, and the question is which ones you want to go for, and in what order. You can spend much effort to go for one, but if an opponent beats you to it by a hair, you will have wasted much effort and have to settle for a smaller reward.

There are many tactical decisions to make. The new cards revealed at the start of every round drive the decisions for that round. Sometimes a card useful to you comes up. Sometimes a card useful to your opponent comes up. Sometimes a card useful to multiple players comes up. Sometimes all the cards are rubbish. One of the cards is face-down, so if all the face-up cards are lousy you can go for the lucky draw.

You need strategic planning in deciding which rewards to go for, but you are at the mercy of the cards which come up, so you often need to adjust your plans, sometimes grabbing unexpected opportunities, sometimes cancelling plans altogether to do something different. The game is an interesting mix of strategic planning, tactical decisions and luck (both good and bad).

Most of the mission tiles have been claimed by now.

There is no text on the encounter cards, only icons. The card on the right is the Madame Ching card. If you complete a voyage and you are one symbol short of qualifying for a skill card, this card can be used to fill in for the third symbol you need.

These are all the rewards I have claimed during the game which give victory points. I only went for the mission tiles which give encounter cards. I was first to raid Hong Kong and gained 10VP, but after the game I found out that I had made a mistake. You are only allowed to play one encounter card per round. In order to reach Hong Kong, I had played more than one encounter card within that particular round.

The Thoughts

Madame Ching is a medium weight game. The core concept is simple. The strategy revolves around which of the many rewards to go for. There is a fair bit of luck in the encounter cards. I think they are quite powerful, and some may be overpowered (e.g. the one that lets you draw three more encounter cards). There is also some luck in what cards become available every round. Sometimes there is simply no good card for you. That's where hand management comes in. This is the main challenge in the game. There are plenty of tactical decisions to be made. The game situation is quite fluid - not unlike braving the fickle seas.

I quite enjoyed the game. The balance between luck and strategy is of the family game type, so you will feel that your decisions do matter, and at the same time luck (both good and bad) will inject excitement and laughter. Skill does not always guarantee victory. Madame Ching will work as a family game, but perhaps not for younger children, because picking objectives to shoot for requires some strategic thinking that they may not be ready for yet.

A delicious Norwegian that liquor has seen more of the world than most Vikings.

The post Tumbler Of The Beast: Linie Aquavit appeared first on MetalSucks.

forever-erica:

bellamyyoung:

atira-patrice:

nya-kin:

Fixed it

what the fuck is english english

Sean Connery is Scottish so he clearly isn’t “English English”.

Pierce Brosnan is Irish so he clearly isn’t “English English”.

Timothy Dalton is Welsh so he clearly isn’t “English English”.

George Lazenby is Australian so he clearly isn’t “English English”.

There have been more non-English Bond stars than English ones so Roger Moore can shove his racist views up his racist arse.  He was a shit Bond anyway.

IT GOT BETTER. 

musterni-illustrates:

-

shitty horoscopes book viii: medicine

amrit brar (musterni), 2015

buy the zines | read them all | instagram | redbubble

roachpatrol:

cuteness-daily:

mintmayhem:

 THE ONE IN THE WHITE TOWEL THOUGH

Purritos

PURRITOS

Crystal Pepsi, the clear cola drink that was released with much fanfare and then flopped spectacularly in the nineties, is rumored to be making a comeback.

The whispers seem to have started with a tweet from the competitive eater and Crystal Pepsi fan Kevin Strahle, which shows a letter to him from Pepsi, dated June 8, 2015, saying, “We definitely hear you and your followers and we think you’ll all be happy with what’s in store.”

Pepsi confirmed the authenticity of the letter to Quartz but declined to provide more information or confirm that plans are in the works to bring the drink back.

As food giants struggle to adjust to a shifting marketplace and growing demand for healthier foods, Pepsi, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary, isn’t alone in trying to cash in on nostalgia. Last fall, Coca-Cola brought back the citrus drink Surge after a Facebook page demanding the drink grew to over 128,000 likes. KFC has reintroduced its iconic character Colonel Sanders and McDonald’s is doing the same with a hipsterized Hamburglar.

At the same time, these companies are trying to provide healthier options: Pepsi removed aspartame from Diet Pepsi; Coca-Cola just announced it would cut its calories 10% per liter; and McDonald’s is offering kale.

All of this underscores what Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi said in April to analysts: “I think we have a challenge these days to really think about what is the definition of ‘good for you’ from a consumer perspective.”

With Crystal Pepsi, the company may be trying to hit both trends. Back in the 1990s, the product was marketed as a more natural version of soda. Its 1993 Superbowl commercial, set to the tune of Van Halen’s “Right Now,” opened with the sentence, “Right now nature’s inventing better stuff than science,” flashing over an image of a naked infant standing on what appears to be a sea floor. It tells the audience that “right now artificial doesn’t feel right.” (Pepsi declined to share the drink’s ingredients list.)

The commercial was later spoofed on Saturday Night Live with a fake commercial for “Crystal Gravy.”

Crystal Pepsi was far from the only clear soda on the shelves in the 1990s: It shared space with Clearly Canadian flavored seltzers (which, it was announced last month, is also making a fan-driven return) and Coke’s Tab Clear cola, among others.

But Pepsi’s was a short ride on the wave of the nineties’ clear beverage trend—by April 1993, Crystal Pepsi’s future was already dimming. “The prospects for Crystal Pepsi, PepsiCo Inc.’s clear cola, are getting cloudy,” the Wall Street Journal reported, noting consumer disappointment with the taste, which was not identical to original Pepsi, as many expected.

Soda sales are now in their tenth year of decline—significantly worse than where they were in 1992, when they had just slowed. But whether Crystal Pepsi will give the brand a boost is not as clear as the beverage.

The photograph above was taken by Anthony Surace and shared under a Creative Commons license on Flickr. It has been cropped.

kellysue:

rafinhaxalcantara:

put the dude stick on your lips. rub it all around your mouth. do it. dude stick on your face.

::o face:: 

I backed that shit, yo. I backed it HARD.

Imma take three Dude Sticks at once.

Yoko Shimomura, more Ninja Gaiden composers join Brave Wave ⊟ 

Amazing news out of Brave Wave, the brilliant label creating original albums with classic game musicians (and, FULL DISCLOSURE, a sponsor through Club Tiny): Yoko Shimomura has joined up to work on a new album of original music. 

That’s Yoko “Final Fight, Street Fighter 2, Kingdom Hearts, Mario & Luigi, Xenoblade, etc.” Shimomura. That’s a big get!

Ryuichi Nitta (Ninja Gaiden 1 & 2) and Kaori Nakabai (NG3) have also joined up, adding to a roster that already includes Ninja Gaiden 1′s Keiji Yamagishi (oh my god get Retro-Active pt.1). There are… a lot more composers new to the BW team. I’ve just attached all of their bios after the break. It’s, like, everybody.

Yoko Shimomura

Shimomura’s name is one of the most recognized in video game history, and her compositions are some of the most beloved. Since graduating from Osaka College of Music in 1988 as a piano major, she has contributed her music to some of the most renowned video games, such as those within the Kingdom Hearts, Mario & Luigi, and Street Fighter 2 series. After working at Capcom and Square Enix for much of her career, she now continues to compose for games through freelance work, and is currently the lead composer on the upcoming Square Enix flagship titles Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III. For Brave Wave, she’ll be contributing to the upcoming concept album Project Light, which is directed by Ippo Yamada (Mega Man series, Mighty No. 9) and Mohammed Taher, in addition to other unannounced albums.

Harumi Fujita

Fujita started her career at SNK in 1984 with Mad Crasher, but her following years at Capcom ended up defining her as a stellar composer. She was one of the few who worked on the NES, arcade, and the Game Boy simultaneously, contributing to games like Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Bionic Commando, Strider, 1943 Kai, Final Fight, and most famously Gargoyle’s Quest. She was part of Capcom’s in­house band Alph Lyla alongside Manami Matsumae (of Mega Man 1) and Yasuaki ‘Bun Bun’ Fujita (Mega Man 3) among others, and ended up composing ‘Needle Man’, ‘Gemini Man’ and ‘Staff Roll’ for Mega Man 3 before passing the rest of the composition on to Bun Bun. In the past few years she has composed and arranged music for various theatrical productions, and now Brave Wave welcomes her arrival to video games once again. Last year at BitSummit, Brave Wave took the stage to unveil that Fujita is part of Project Light.

Masashi Kageyama

After composing the cult­favorite Gimmick! for the NES, Kageyama slowly retreated from the limelight and decided to change gears from music to design. He built his new career over the years and not only went on to master photography and design, but also ended up becoming an in­house favorite at NARU, the oldest jazz house in Japan. As a jazz enthusiast himself, he started performing with his saxophone during the past two years, and today he’s officially back as a gaming composer with Brave Wave. Kageyama is currently planning his first­ever solo album with Director Mohammed Taher (In Flux, Retro­Active Pt. 1) and looks forward to finally contributing his signature jazzy style to Western games. His photo exhibition of jazz players in Japan will take place in Tokyo, Ginza at “Gallery 84” from August 24 to September 5, 2015.

Yuji Takenouchi

Better known as TECHNOuchi to his colleagues and fans, Takenouchi’s career is an expansive one that began way back with the MSX, where he composed for classics like Metal Gear 2 and SD Snatcher. In recent years, Takenouchi gained popularity and respect as the founder of the now­ defunct music collective GE­ON­DAN (which featured a large group of Japanese video game musicians) and has served as the lead sound director on From Software’s critically acclaimed Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls games, as well Access Games’ D4. He wishes to connect with a global audience through Brave Wave, and is preparing an album of unreleased game music to be released for the first time ever.

Ryuichi Nitta

Ryuichi Nitta started his gaming career at Tecmo, where he co­composed the original Ninja Gaiden alongside Keiji Yamagishi (using Yamagishi’s sound driver), and then went on to compose the soundtracks to Ninja Gaiden 2 and Solomon’s Key 2. After his time at Tecmo and Banpresto, Nitta became a freelancer and co­founded his own music company, Kajiya Music, with Keiji Yamagishi and Kaori Nakabai (of Ninja Gaiden 3). Now, fifteen years later, Brave Wave is proud to represent the full Kajiya Music family in conducting their business outside of Japan.

Kaori Nakabai

Following the works of Keiji Yamagishi and Ryuichi Nitta at Tecmo, Kaori Nakabai took over Ninja Gaiden 3 and was able to deliver the same quality of music that the series was well known for. Her gameography includes Tecmo’s role­playing game Radia Senki (composed alongside Yamagishi) and the fan­ favorite Captain Tsubasa 3 on the Super Famicom. She went to Koei and helped shape the soundtrack of Dynasty Warriors with Yamagishi, and then formed Kajiya Music alongside Yamagishi and Nitta. Today, Nakabai looks forward to working on Western games as well as contributing original tracks to Brave Wave’s music catalogue.

George Art “Smoke Thief” Baker

Smoke Thief is the alias of George Art Baker, a British composer with a Master of Arts in Music Performance. Formerly a professional jazz bandleader and composer, he was drawn to create a style incorporating ambient, jazz, and hip­hop. Emerging from this jazz background with his own style, he set out to explore more minimalistic arrangements that focus on connecting listeners to his vast inner worlds, evident in his recent work for Relay FM’s podcast Behind the App as well as his Bounty Hunter Remix on Keiji Yamagishi’s Retro­Active Pt. 1. Brave Wave is proudly presenting him as the label’s first original artist. His new album is coming out soon, following Keiji Yamagishi’s Retro­Active Pt. 1.

Alex Mauer & Steve Lakawicz

Mauer is the co­founder of game company Imagos Softworks, home of the upcoming Starr Mazer videogame in which Mauer serves as its lead composer. His involvement in Starr Mazer finds him working with a multitude of musicians including Brave Wave’s Manami Matsumae (Mega Man) and Keiji Yamagishi (Ninja Gaiden). Mauer is perhaps best known for his 2007 album ‘Vegavox’, which was the first album to be released on handmade NES cartridges. Alongside him is chiptune tracker Steve ‘ap0c’ Lakawicz, a classically trained musician with a Master’s degree in Music Performance, specializing in orchestral tuba.

Lakawicz have toured with brass quintets and performed with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and lately have taken an interest into crafting and emulating authentic chiptunes. The duo’s initial role at Brave Wave is to work closely with Director Mohammed Taher and Keiji Yamagishi on a special project involving authentic NES sounds (TBA), and Brave Wave is excited to add their exceptional talent at crafting authentic chip sounds to the team.