The Explosive Alan Podcast

Gareth, Ash and a very croaky Dan rate new, AI-generated intro themes, answer a lot of your deeply personal questions and share their love for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, Robocop: Rogue City, Venba and V Rising. Plus! A quiz to test our knowledge of weirdly named classics, and we mourn the loss of two wonderful studios at the hands of bad Microsoft management. Good job our podcast has just been acquired by Microsoft*, eh? (Fact checking Dan here: I realise now that Robocop: Rogue City is set *between* Robocop 2 and 3, but I'm glad it barely references the awful third film.) *For roughly an hour  

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! In this jumbo comeback edition of the show, Ash, Dan and Gareth are back in the saddle and ready to fill you in what they've been up to for the last four years while offering zero explanation for their extended absence. The show itself has emerged from stasis unchanged, so expect the usual answers to your questions, a rundown of what we're playing and a quiz inspired by Gareth's universal currency of choice. Rather embarrassingly, it's been so long since our last recording that we completely forgot that the Great Debate topic is EXACTLY the same as the previous episode's. Whoops. (Also, contrary to Jazz McVoiceover's claims in the intro, Simon Chong doesn't appear in this episode. Sorry.)

Simon's back! Sort of. We catch up with our transatlantic absentee Alan via 'live' satellite linkup, and discover how life is for our LA-ex. (Spoiler: enviably great.) We also delve into some excellent Getting To Know Us questions, including casting our dream game-to-TV series. Plus! The world's most successful arcade games form the basis of our quiz Play Your Cabs Right. And, to honour the passing of Konami code creator Kazuhisa Hashimoto, we discuss your--and our--favourite cheats.

We skirt dangerously close to highbrow territory this week, as we discuss which games introduced you to hitherto unknown periods of history or works of fine art. Hopefully it's only a blip. Elsewhere, Gareth's love of Fortnite is reignited, Ash explores post-apocalyptia on a land boat, and Dan slowly unravels in a quiz custom-built to break him.

Who's your Best Gaming Friend? After last episode's rather downbeat discussion, we bring the mood back up with a chat about those special someones that you can always depend on to be up for a game. We also cover old franchises that we'd love to see revived, including Timesplitters and obscure Sierra gem Manhunter: New York, plus there's a tricky quiz on Academy Award-winning film titles in other languages. Oh, and there's some soup chat.