The ship drops out of hyperspace with its familiar sickening jolt, seventeen tonnes of metal and plastic reducing speed in an instant. Its crew of three slowly stir from their statis-enduced slumber. Coffee is filtered while they wake up and step in to the hold, taking their dry deodorant showers. The small freighter’s scanners indicate the hull received some slight but insignificant damage while at top speed, nothing a little paint wouldn’t fix. The ship’s Captain, Neil Hickton and his crew, Andy Buick and Dave Browne AKA Smiley Dave, step onto the small bridge where three chairs sit before a plethora of screens and controls. Andy logs into the navigation system, checking the coordinates of their current location and the distance to the destination. A red light flashes on the console immediately in front of Dave, he looks at it, pointing open-mouthed, his headset falls to the floor with a bang. The space station is exactly where they expected it to be. Neil guides the vessel gently into place and sets the umbilical corridor to extend towards the airlock. The comms system gently buzzes as the station’s frequency is selected and a familiar friendly voice greets them, ” Welcome to Frontier Developments. This is Adam Woods, shall we get started?” Frontier Developments is one of the big boys in the games industry, they’ve made some big games over the years, including the likes of Rollercoaster Tycoon, Thrillville, Lost Winds and Kinectimals. Perhaps their biggest and most well-known games are in the Elite series and the latest, Elite: Dangerous, is currently in Alpha. Adam Woods is the game’s producer and joins Neil, Andy and Dave to chat about Elite: Dangerous and many more things besides. What we talk about in this episode: What we’ve been playing Interview Adam Woods Elite: Dangerous Flappy Bird Steam Tagging Titanfall Beta The 1080p vs 900p debate This episode and our previous podcasts are available on iTunes, please be sure to rate and subscribe! Alternatively, you can subscribe to our Podcast RSS feed. Sadly, this is Neil, Andy and Dave’s very last podcast for This is my Joystick, we’re off to try something else. Before we go we would like to say a huge thank you to all our guests, listeners and supporters for the This is my Joystick podcast and wish you all the best in your future endeavours. Keep on gaming! From left: Andy Buick, Dave Browne, Neil Hickton and Al Mollison – Photo taken by Mark Chance
