Listen Now:

 The 2006 Awards [48:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

NBS Award Winners:

Game of the Year: Dead Rising (Rich), Oblivion (Brett), Lego Star Wars 2 (Hiren)

Product of the Year: Intel Core Architecture (Unanimous)

Best Company of 2006: Brett nominates NVIDIA (we all agree)

Worst Company of 2006: Sony (Unanimous)

Worst Game 2006: Broken Sword 4 (Rich), Dark Star One (Hiren),

Worst Product Launch of 2006: PS3 (Unanimous), Zune (Richard, Hiren), AMD Athlon AM2 (Richard)

Best Podcast of 2006: NBS-Review (Obviously)

Best Gadget of 2006: Plantronics Audio 510 USB Headset (Hiren), Logitech MM28 Speakers (Brett), Tom Tom’s (Richard)

Worst Gadget of 2006: Sapphire Motherboards (Richard), BMWs iDrive (Hiren), ATI Chipsets, Windows Mobile 5 (Brett)

Product/Service most anticipated in 2007: Office 2007, Wii Virtual Console (Richard), Wiimote (Hiren), Steam (Brett), Virtualisation (Richard)

Episode Notes:

Off topic heaven! Core - 680i - Overclocking - Free ones? - Shared Cache: Core versus K8L? - Cache architecture - History of cache implementation - software using it.. Wooooo.

In hindsight, I think Brett is totally on the money nominating NVIDIA as the company of the year. If you’ve been following NV’s stock price it’s almost doubled in the last twelve months!

691 Million TRANSISTORS. Not transsexuals. I should think before I talk.

Games that should be remade and not fucked with: Freelancer (Good call, Brett).

Broken Rec-Rec-Rec-Rec-Rec-Record Time: Ripping it into Sony. Actually the rootkit was 2005, but the building defacing was this year, along with Racist advertising and lets not forget the most recent Viral Advertising. Anyone else think they should have stopped at PS2? Maybe we shouldn’t bring up Betamax or the Bookman, maybe Blu-Ray will win? It might end up like their UMDs, although the MiniDisks were slightly more successful. I could go on, but I’m sure I’m boring you.

NOT! That I ever imply that women can’t read maps. That was not an insinuation I made, merely arguments do happen and as we were all guys, obviously the most likely person to have in the seat next to us is the significant other.

Brett tells me you can get 45 hours battery life with 4AAs on his Logitech speakers. It is an awesome bit of kit.

Lets hope ATI’s RD600 doesn’t suffer from the same problems as previous ATI chipsets. Lets hope Sapphire doesn’t get a hold of it.

Music: FOUR MINUTES of the awesome Whispers from Lagoona by Andreas Viklund! Hiren, posted the whole track! WOOT!

Anyone has any other nominations; feel free to leave a comment!

- Richard

I hope you all enjoy our first (and possibly last) award show, we thought it was the right time to reflect on the years technology progress and look foreward to the future.

- Hiren

Listen Now:

 NBS Review EP18.66 - Behind The Podcast. EP19 - Violence Is A Given, In High Definition. [39:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode Topics:
Downloading Games: The future of distribution?

PS3 Launches. Violence is a given, in High Definition.

Banning Games for Content? Or are they liable to the artistic expression excuse that movie content survives in.

Should people pre-disposed to violence not be allowed to play violent games or see violent movies?

Episode Notes:

Yes, my introductory “questions” are excessive, I know, but I’m trying to produce some seed of conversation transforming it into a utopia of flourishing discussion. Clearly, I fail miserably.

Apparently Hiren had a bitch of a job editing it since the levels were all over the place. Despite doing seriously well, he’s committed to learning Audio Hijack Pro and it’s plugins so hopefully it’ll turn out even better in the future. He obviously got lazy though and couldn’t be arsed to put in some end music, so repeated the intro..

To confirm: The PS3 harddisk is a 2.5″ harddisk, the same as the 360.

- Richard

Listen Now:

 NBS Review EP17: Sony Kills, EA Spys and we all see Red. [53:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Epsiode Topics:

Sony Kills Lik Sang and Grey Imports of its products in the UK;

Red products that give to charty;

EA spyware and game micropayments;

The Goldern Joystick Game Awards.

Episode Notes:

This is the rant edition where we seem to enjoy letting out some pent up aggression towards those who aggravate us. I have to admit that it felt better afterwards to get it all off my chest. Ahhhhhhhh.

Yes, I know, we’ve done micropayments for episodic content before but this is different. So Shush.

I just realised we participate in a fuck load of willy pulling in this episode as we freely admit to giving generously to AIDS charities in Africa without resorting to consumerism by proxy. The truth is we probably just drop our change into pots at McDonalds, so that will get fat kids a off their arses for 30 minutes or some shit, rather than reaching those in third world countries with terminal diseases. Yeah! We rock!

Brett got in the phallic reference with deciding that buying a gold Wii means you’ll be getting a Gold Member. He did it funnier than I can describe, or, at least I thought so with my juvenile sense of humour.

We have no actual idea what hand EA has with regards to Crysis and Crytek, we hope it’s just a publishing company and that Crytek have got a better deal with EA than Ubisoft, or they might have just been bought out like so many others. Our ideas have no actual factual basis, other than suggesting what might happen given the recent history and market trends towards such a business model. We sincerely hope they don’t package Crysis with a tub of lube.

Listen past the end for out-takes and screwups.

I hope you can’t wait for our NBS-Review awards for 2006 in December. It’ll be so awesome!.. Well, ok, it’ll be better than the Goldern Joysticks.

In hindsight, that isn’t a huge achievement.

EDIT: This will be the last week we use that intro because it’s crap and I hate it. We’ll go back to generic game music from next week.
- Richard

Listen Now:

 NBS Review EP16: Now Pee Oow Dee Free [41:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode Topics:

Apple tries to patent podcast, or pod, or something about Condoms?

Tokyo Gameshow fallout

More god damn Sony news, yeesh.

Symantec’s company relations program and professionalism

HP shenanigans

Episode Notes:

We have a fantabulous new Intro! WOO! I hope you enjoy it and have a laugh as well, any comments and suggestions are happily received. Unless they’re negative, then you can get to fuck.

I got this weeks phallic reference in early with the Durex = Tape versus Condom brand, even if it took 10 minutes to do it. And yes, my car was held together for a week or so with tape because some of the bolts had rusted through and broken off.

Brett manages to insult a huge proportion of the East Asian community in about two sentences, like the ignorant American he is. Publically, I’m naturally “shocked and ashamed”, but privately I’m proud of him for achieving the feat. Am I surprised? Hell no. We take the piss out of everyone equally so noone can complain about descrimination.

We do TRY NOT to talk about console hardware every-single-episode but it seems we just can’t help ourselves. We promise to NOT discuss anything console hardware related next episode. Perhaps.

Brett has a hardcore rant on Symantec. I know he’s been saving it for a while and I’m sure he feels happier now it’s off his chest.

I was famished by the end of this ep and a bacon butty really hits the spot on a Saturday afternoon. If you’re Moslem or Jewish, try… uhh… I’m really sorry but I’ve sat here thinking for like, five minutes stressing over a substitute but nothing really goes that well with Brown Sauce. It’s one of those things, every other meat I think of just doesn’t fit right. Send me an email or post a comment about alternative foods you recommend that hits juuuuust that hunger spot in the belly.

The Levelator is a fantastic piece of software for short bursts of audio. It really helped on the intro having cuts from a dozen different episodes all at different volumes. It’s use on the whole episode just isn’t viable since it makes everything louder and the static becomes unbearable.

The outro is a video game remix from here, apparently influenced from the classic Street Fighter 2. You can grab it there on mp3 for your portable music player of choice.

- Richard

Listen Now:

 NBS-Review EP15: The Fashion of Bags, Sound, Internets and Gaming. [42:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode Topics:

PS3 launch delay

Wii release + Wii jokes

PA versus Joystick

Zune

Apple iTunes 7, new Nano (Mino?) and Shuffles

PC-World says MySpace is the worlds worst internet site.

Manbags!

Semi-nude Flickr community!

Episode Notes:

H editing this week and doing it a new way: intro-music-straight into conversation. We’re trying it out to see how it is received by our lovely listeners.

Audio:

Powergramo, again failed to record. It saved, then crashed, then deleted the 800meg temp file as I reopened it. “What a delightfully designed program“, I was heard to remark as this happened. H’s backup recording in Hotrecorder was our saving grace, but it’s 24KHz medium-fidelity, not uberific 48KHz.

We’re a little late with the release we recorded the Saturday before last but we’ve all been real busy with the usual thing called life we have no choice but to partake in. If someone has a remote with a pause button relating to the general flow of time and the earth moving, please, send me an email indicating where I can get a hold of one.

The Wii WONT be region free, unlike stated, and boy am I an unhappy bunny. My pre-order on play.com is now £300 for 2 games, Wii and extra controller + nunchuck. In comparison my Xbox 360 premium with 5 games, vga lead and extra wireless controller was £260 second hand! Bah the expensive Wii, but I need Zelda in order to correctly function as a human.

Article on Wired about Sony:

Zune, now due to cost $229.

Big-up to our guest, Wil from Bit-tech for his time on a Saturday afternoon. Cheers bud

Will recommends Prison Break for $2 in 640×480. Gogogogo. Surfing CDs by cover art? and RSS season passes for series content?

Interesting MySpace read at ValleyWag.com

£430 expanding foam brain massaging headphones; “We can bung a link in later..” No we can’t we still haven’t found it. Sorry.

As soon as Wil mentioned nude chicks and tech I dropped everything and abandoned my audio responsibilities to look at female body parts. Apart from owning an ultra stylish manbag with my life in it, my need for pics of chicks bits is still high.
- Richard

Apologies for the delay, real life got in the way. Also Powergamo is worse program ever created.

It’s still a good listen even if it’s a tad dated, music is from Auto Assualt Soundtrack which is now free.

Both me and Richard do own man-bags, and yes I really do use it to protect my lunch.
-Hiren

Listen Now:

 NBS Review EP14: Long ago in a land of Chips, Disks and Moving Pictures [39:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode Topics:

Goodbye to the Pentium processor;

50 years of harddisk technology;

TV videogames shows, nbs-games-review? and the new Xbox 360 mod chip;

Episode Notes;

A short episode this week for you. One you listen to over breakfast, nipping to the shops or whilst on the John, perhaps. We aim for convenience to fill those otherwise quiet spots in your day.

If no one believes me that even the latest Core2’s are loosely based on the old Pentium Pro’s read the Wiki!

12:30: “Just increase the speed and add more stuff on to it”. Honestly, what the hell was I on about?? If you know where I was going with that or any of this episodes rants drop me an email or leave a comment because I clearly don’t have a clue what is up from down.

The first two episode topics are more of a reportive style rather than a discussion on an issue. In future we are looking to do more of the latter and hopefully get more ‘industry guests’ on.

Clearly we care little about not offending women by referring to you as “all just playing The Sims”, which is about as much as we care for factual accuracy. When you do something, don’t do it by halves. Brett also snuck in more PS3 talk into this episode despite H’s adamant stance that we’ve talked about consoles enough.

Noise other than ourselves this week is provided by the incredible Chris Kline with his Necronomicon for the intro and Final Fantasy II Prelude fantracks as end. You’ll have to Google for his work since I found these weeks ago and as usual I haven’t bookmarked the link to his work, to provide for you. For my inadequacies, I apologise.

- Richard