That’s pretty handy since Ricky is out at the show for reasons which will become clear soon enough, but any road, Kahoots is nominated for the Best Casual/Puzzle Game for Handheld, how cool is that! It has some stiff competition, but that we’re in with a shout against the likes of Little Big Planet PSP and Lego Rock Band DS shows you how well received the game has been. We’re chuffed to bits, thanks Pocket Gamer! Full list of all the awards and nominations can be found here.

Here’s our category, though. How bonkers is this, look at who we’re up against!

Best Casual/Puzzle Game finalists

Art Style: CODE [DS] (Nintendo)
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure [DS] (Electronic Arts)
Kahoots [PSP] (Honeyslug)
Lego Rock Band [DS] (Warner Bros)
LittleBigPlanet [PSP] (Sony Computer Entertainment)

In other Kahoots related news, there is now a Kahoots theme available on PS3 and PSP to be downloaded from the PlayStation store. There was a free giveaway of 5000 of them on the Playstation Europe Blog and there may be a last few still available there if you hurry. Stop Press – Obviously, at this time we urge you to follow the advice of Sony on current PS3 network issues before you attempt to download the theme.

Finally, and rather disappointingly, the BBC has confirmed its intention to close the excellent 6Music radio station. If you haven’t already, you can read our thoughts on it here and there is still time to stop this from happening, if you’re already a fan of the station, you can find details on how to register your opinon. If you are yet to listen to this genuinely innovative music station we urge you now, before it’s too late, to give it a try to understand why we feel so passionate about this. 6Music.

I latched onto 6Music reasonably early in it’s life, the brilliant radio duo of Mark and Lard had ran its natural course on Radio 1 and were sent their separate ways on the network. Radcliffe was a known entity whilst Marc Riley (Lard), and 6Music, were something of an unknown quantity. Thanks to the power of the Psion Wavefinder, one Saturday on 6Music, I sat there and listened to “Marc Riley’s Rocket Science” and suddenly I had something other than sports radio to listen to again.

In the subsequent years there have been a fantastic mix of broadcasters, countless new and exciting groups discovered, and controversy (one of those tedious call scandals that only the Daily Mail cared about came from 6, as did Russell Brand and, sadly, George Lamb).

I have two radio stations in my life, 5Live and 6Music, sports and news can sometimes bring you down, whilst the variety and sheer uplifting content always available from 6Music never fails to put a smile on our faces. Adam & Joe we’re, and will hopefully continue to be, very funny and entertaining, Shaun Keaveny has become an excellent replacement on Breakfast after the brilliant Phill Jupitus left. Jon Holmes Saturday show is a personal favourite, Marc Riley still champions new music with the zeal of the legendary John Peel. Gideon Coe, Bruce Dickenson Rock Show, Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show the list is endless and each offering a unique musical slant. I could bang on about shows of the past such as Brindsley Ford’s Dub Show, The Queens of Noize, etc…the list goes on and on.

6Music is more than listener figures, it’s a vital line for new and diverse music styles to be absorbed by avid music fans. It’s loss would be a travesty, only the other day my walk to the station was accompanied by Regina Spektor, the incredible Faith No More and then Jeff Buckley. That would only happen on one station. 6Music. Show your support for the station and don’t let it become part of a needless bloodletting to satisfy an indignant minority of BBC haters.

If you don’t know anything about 6Music, check out the station here.

If you do know about it and want to register your frustration, there’s a facebook group (I’m not normally an advocate, but make an exception with this) here.

Right back to my script…

10 PRINT “Makr is Skillo!”
20 GOTO 10

Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!

Makr! Gah!!! I give up!

It’s been proper Baltic over the last month in the UK, but the weekend of 2009 Chinese New Year was not a weekend to decide to take time out to grab some snaps of the Kahoot on the wander around London. Given Nat and Ricky were hard at work on the game code that weekend, I felt I should contribute *something* to the development process. Being as the last thing I coded in anger was in Z80, I was best to stay away from them and instead wander the streets of the capital carrying a small brown box containing an increasingly battered looking clay figure and a brief to get pictures “which are dead touristy”.

Obviously a number of the pics didn’t make it into the final cut, so I thought you might like to see them here, now. With your eyes. Enjoy!

The interview is credited to me, which is something of a misnomer as it was a collaborative effort where anything considered and well written was by Ricky, and the bits that look like an ape has punched a keyboard are by yours truly.

You can read the online article here, if words and pictures is your thing, try this on for size. Check out pages 28-29 (Nat – 30Under30), 34-35 (interview) and 38-39 (advert).

Tomorrow, following on from Ricky’s ace post about how Kahoots might have looked, we have a picture special looking back at some more of the things we did on behalf of the development of Kahoots. It’ll be ace! Like one of those nostalgia programmes except without the likes of Stuart Maconie, Chris Moyles and Jane Moore pretending not to be able to remember things.

There’s a bigger one after the jump.

Biggest news is that our game came out as one of the top 10 PSP games of 2009. This is based on the metacritic score (for those unaware – Metacritic is a site which collates review scores from a variety of sources, weights them appropriately and spews forth an overall score – 80 and above is regarded as a good score) and from our perspective the score puts us 8th in the table for all PSP games released in 2009. Just above Resistance and Monster Hunter, and just behind FIFA10. That’s a bit special! To see the full top 10 check it out here and see the nice things they say about it.

Seguing seamlessly into another paragraph about nice things about us, my search revealed a number of quite lovely things that reviewers have said about Kahoots and us. The review list of Save The Kahoots will be updated in due course for the new comments, but here are some of the “That’d look ace on the back of a box” bits which made us feel all fuzzy inside.

“But the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts and all this adds up to an adorable, but mentally challenging game which will tax even the sharper of brains. £2.49 doesn’t buy you much at the moment, but it now buys you one of the best Minis on the store. Individuality is rare in games nowadays, and Honeyslug should get a hearty pat on the back for having the balls to do something a little different.” – 4.5/5 Junkiegamer.com

“What you do get in Kahoots is a charming little god game (if you will) which will keep you occupied on train and bus journeys, or perhaps a little escape from a more serious and substantial game. If you want an eccentric, zany and enjoyable game for a very reasonable price, pick up Kahoots.” – 83% VGChartz.com

“When the work of Aardman Studios is being discussed, people often mention the fact that you can see the fingerprints of the Aardman artists imprinted in the plasticine figures of Wallace & Gromit and friends. It’s implied (or explicitly stated) that the fingerprints are not just literal but also metaphorical, describing the particular aesthetic of Aardman’s work, the love and care they take with their creations, and so on.
I believe the same metaphor can be used for Kahoots. I don’t think the PSP’s screen resolution will allow you to see the physical fingerprints of the Honeyslug team, but you don’t need to — they’re there all the same.” – User comments European Playstation Blog

Don’t forget Kahoots is £1.74/€1.99 from tomorrow for 2 weeks!

To make your life in the world of the Kahoot much easier, our very own Nat Marco created a hints and tips guide to help learn the tricks of the game. This is no bullet pointed list of cold hard facts, like everything else in Kahoots it’s a handdrawn picture guide which the lovely people at Sony Europe have made available on the PlayStation blog here.

So with a knock-down price and a handy page of helpful stuff from Nat to get you started, there’s never been a better reason to buy Kahoots minis for your PSP, and don’t forget, that Kahoots minis is also available for download and play on PS3’s fancy emulator.

Our first panning of that particular stream (and I promise this is the last wild west/gold rush anaology) was with Balloon Headed Boy, which is now available for FREE from our friends at Gimme5games.com. The game has a long and rich history, and among that history was the incredible popularity the game enjoyed in China.

Back in 2005 when the idea of Apple producing anything other than an expensive CAD machine wrapped in white plastic would’ve been silly, us lot were still part of Morpheme, a rather innovative little mobile games company, and we had just finished Balloon Headed Boy on most of the major mobile devices, at the time it was something of a bun-fight to get stuff placed on major operators without a) Branding and b) Support of a large publisher, so we were keen to place BHB in as many places as possible. We were fortunate to be in touch with the UK representatives of a company called MIG, which located games on behalf of China Mobile and they were blown away by BHB on mobile and immediately got behind it to promote it as much as they could.

We received many links to Chinese sites and magazine features with BHB featured in. Then they told us they were going to promote the game at a university campus in Beijing. We were chuffed to bits! They said that they would promote the game with T-shirts, playing cards (up there) and the usual stuff, but nothing could prepare us for the photographs of what they’d produced to display the game in. Check it out…