The regular Jackie Kashian podcast, entitled the Dork Forest, featured Ollie from the studio this week. Whilst he spends most of the time talking about robot toys he does get a brief mention about the upcoming “In Space” DLC for Burn Zombie Burn. The podcast is on iTunes but you can also listen to it here.

Separately, his recent Roboto-chan column over at Game Set Watch which covers the more contemporary Transformers games was also posted over at Gamasutra.

I’ve written a feature for the Escapist as to the origin of Japanese mecha games and that the effect of samurai has been a culturally palpable one. I didn’t come up with the title but it’s catchy and apt I think. Enjoy!

I’ve written yet another entry to my column about the wondrous Virtual On series. This is to commemorate the upcoming digital download version of Oratorio Tangram. I hope you enjoy my somewhat lengthy ramblings (this also got posted on Gamasutra).

This edition of my regular mechanical musings is more conceptual I suppose, as it covers the genre of mecha gaming in relation to just simple presentation of mecha (like the Gundam Musou games, which are more aesthetic tie-ins than functional ones). Here’s hoping it stops ignorant numpties from calling Gundam Musou a “mecha game”.

As per usual, I wrote a piece about lesser known mecha games out there. This time I covered the wonderful Bangai-O series by the Japanese developer, Treasure. The point of the article was to highlight the obvious (though somehow overlooked) fact that these games are very much functionally inspired by anime series like Layzner, Ideon and Macross. Anyway, I hope you enjoy my continued nerdy musings!

I’ve restarted my regular column on all things mecha gaming over at the wonderful Game Set Watch. This edition covers the unfortunate fallout of making a Macross game, as they’re often a functional travesty. However, this is more down to the nature of what is being functionally represented as the mecha have three varied modes. Meaning you have to make three games occurring simultaneously with one another, which is no mean feat!