That guy's a Maniac...

Yes. It is indeed Xmas. The time of year for family, eating, drinking from 11am, presents and sleeping. But as Sir Bob highlighted we should also think about all those people living in the third world who don't get to celebrate christmas at all. They also get stomped on by a dungaree wearing maniac too. Sucks to live in the third world. Believe it or not, this post was inspired by an excellent joke in ONM issue 51. Kidding you, I am not.

This one is from the only other fellow  gaming celebrity   Leigh Alexander. "I prefaced this post with a reminder of the business realities major blog networks face because I find it hard to believe that Brian, who taught me quite a great deal about going the extra mile on news reporting -- because our audience deserves the whole truth -- would thumbs-up a porn star's "celebrity" advice column unless it were part of a larger and necessary Gawker initiative" Brian Kotaku Brian? The whole truth? Good one Leigh. Good one.

Read it . The first part of the article is excellent observational humour and the whole thing sms up the frustration most of gamer kind has come across at some point. Brooker even picks up on the lack of gaming celebrities thing . However. A few comments down and we get the age old console wars stuff, some game snobbery, LULZ I'm a girl, aren't games addictive? etc. the usual stuff. Games may have become a bit more widely appreciated but gamers sure as hell aren't. I'm officially ex-communicating the gaming community until it levels up a bit. Starting. Now.

Is this muggy cunt in Wii Fit Plus (on the right in the image above). I don't know how he is voiced in other territories but he sounds like a proper geeza in the PAL version. Here are a selection of sound bites: "Punch it! Don't touch it up you muggy cunt" "Alright you muggy cunt let's box this mush" "I'm a cockney I'm a cockney" "Ening staaaaaaaaaad. Ening staaaaaaaad" "Jog on you muggy cunt" "Ya muvva ya muvva ya muvva. And ya faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaava" "Love a duck you muggy muvva" "Cost you a pony you muvva" We don't even know his name but we love him. Excercise and video game characters have never been so fun. We can't wait for him to get his own sequel Wii Geezer . Basically you spend the whole game selling pineapples, driving taxis and taking shanks's pony everywhere. IMPROMPTU REVIEW BASED ON CONCEPT ALONE ; Excellent characterisation and a good storyl...

As many of you are aware "The Saboteur" came out today. Its a little 3rd person romp through Nazi occupied France, you play an Irishman being a pest to everything Nazi-esque. It's being praised as gritty, dark and atmospheric, but castrated with moderate gameplay. It's a bit of a faux pas releasing anything even slightly 3rd person-y with Assassins Creed 2 still going hot from the shelves, especially one which looks and feels like Altaïr in Nazi France. Negativity aside its a better experience than it is a game. But lastly and most importantly the game has boobs. That's right tits, titties, mammaries, breasticles, jugs, melons, jumper puppies . Because the game is set in France it has, of course, got the lumpenproletariat, bohemian, mid-war desperation. And what better to illustrate that than Burlesque shows and Gambling! Where there are people trying to make money there are always boobs: Cant see them? Now you don't need to even ...

That means it's still not legal :( But yeah statutory rape jokes aside, fifteen years ago we were eyeing up that one big parcel under the tree crossing our fingers that it was a Playstation! Then on 25th being delighted and playing Demo1 over and over. Ah memories Tomb raider, Crash Bandicoot, Broken sword, Descent, Wipeout, and that weird thing where you could control a T-Rex... Yeah so 15 years, bet that makes you feel old! Merry playstaionmas, Richie XX

You are inappropriately dressed and have been shot and fallen down a fuck off huge long ass metal shaft, probably bumped down the sides a bit and landed on a cold hard metal floor and then had to carry around a Rocket Launcher to throw to your "boyfriend". Racked with pain, alive against all the odds and probably going to die. What would you do next? a) Phone an ambulance ASAP. My bones are broken. The pain, the pain how am I not dead. b) Just lay there and hope to bleed out sooner rather than later. c) As above with crying. d) Put some bandages on my horribly broken limbs and then limp slightly. CHOOSE YOUR ANSWER NOW The correct answer was d) just put some bandages on and get on with it and SPOILERS kill a whole bunch of hunters, dogs, zombies, lickers and a weird stone Tyrant thing. If you answered a), b) or c) then you aren't cut out for the worst spy ever industry I am afraid. Try your luck at retail management or maybe custo...

As some of our more diligent readers are aware we don't like Kotaku very much. For those of you who are not so diligent and here because you were linked here, these are the reasons we don't like it: 1. The colour scheme. 2. The half truths and rumours. The dodgy reporting  and then reposting their own failed reporting  as some kind of flaw in ' games journalism' . 3. The dross you have to sift through... Nobody cares (and if you do, you really need to rethink your priorities) about the latest maximum risky doll from a 10 year old jRPG. 4. Day/night note. We thought we killed it off but it has come back. Remember kids, you should buy Arcade Mania. 5. I have never laughed with Kotaku, only at it. To say it is devoid of genuine grown up humour is being overly generous. 6. It's too American. Way too much attention on tits. There are even better parts on a woman (hint:around the armpit and pantsu regions work well) and almost no talk of the wang despite 25%...

We've literally just invented microfanficcing everybody. And now after all the lies, plagiarism and law suits we're now ready to tell our story about how it all started. Richie : Well it all started when we I was excited about the Chocobo for the Xbox 360 avatars. Cunzy1 1 : Yeah. I was ridiculing him for having a light sabre, chocobo and megatron hat and being over the age of 15. Richie : That's right. Well I went on to say that the only reason I wanted the chocobo was to pretend I was Irvine from Final Fantasy 8 and get to bad touch Selphie. Cunzy1 1 : Then... oh god this sounds so bad. Then we went on to talking about Zell. I mean here is this guy in this band of merry men each with different skillz and all he can do is punch people. Richie : He doesn't even have a dog. Cunzy1 1 : Exactly and then I asked Richie what he called Angelo because I called Angelo 'bitch' so Rinoa's limit break was Bitch Strike and Bitch Rush. Then Richie fan ficked the Bitch n...

Did you see what I did there? The Saatchi's Best of British TV show has inspired this post. We are not ones to bore you all to death with information written in paragraphs. Our preferred method is the list: games are/aren't art thing is long dead. Nobody talks about it anymore and we're not ones to be ahead of the curve! However watching some of the top artists and art critics talk absolute bollocks about what is or isn't even good or bad art in the excellent 1) Games are of too broad appeal. From a midnight addiction to Minesweeper through to the latest mini game on the iphone. Everyone has at some point played a game. It is really hard to be elitist when everyone knows what you are talking about and can call you out on the BS. So games aren't art because it is too popular. Also, a game which nobody has played makes headlines for a scene taken out of context. A tunnel in which an artist rapes people barely makes Gawker media . People care about games ev...

All the time, the cold lonely empty silence of the comments section and TGAM's email inbox seems to be asking me "Why if you are the official Capcom website do you never do anything on the Street Fighter series?". I'm sure that is what the silence asks of me. And if I were to answer it, my answer would be a three parter. Firstly, why do we only seem to ever write about Pokemon and Resident Evil? This is the bigger concern. Why pick out Street Fighter? Jeez. Secondly, I hate Street Fighter but it isn't because I think the fighting genre hasn't progressed at all in over a decade, it isn't because now there are stupid bars everywhere and nobody tells me what each of them mean or how to activate any of them so I just button mash until something explosiony happen and it isn't even because 'So there is this fighting tournament' has been the standard plot for fighting games since forever. Thirdly, the real reason why I hate Street Fighter is beca...

From Dante to Mario. Can it be done? Started off quite hard because we figured we couldn't get out of Capcomland. But here's how it is done kids. Dante-Viewtiful Joe courtesy of Viewtiful Joe. Viewtiful Joe-Ryu courtesy of Tatsunoko vs Capcom Then we go Ryu to Mitsurugi courtesy of Namco X Capcom Then we go from Mitsurugi to that Link chap via Soul Calibuuuur 2. And finally from Link to the podgy plumber via Superu Smashu Brotheru! Can you do it with less degrees? Do have a go. And while you are at it see if you can beat: Mickey Mouse to Sonic the Hedgehog- 4 degrees. Master Chief to Solid Snake- 3 degrees (cheating a bit). Megatron to your own Mii- 2 degrees. And if you can get those you can get practically anywhere! Anywhere worth going anyway. Characters with no degrees to anybody just aren't worth it people.

Exclusive: Lady Gaga: Glitz, Glamour and Gaming. Ok well... when we heard about this we were worried that it was going to be some kind of soulless cash-in, but after chatting with the (undisclosed) developer we have reconsidered our stance a little. "We are attempting to encapsulate Gaga's individual fashion, glitz and glamour and translate that to a playable medium. It is not our intention to create some droll dress-up aimed for tweens, we want to create something iconic and playable, essentially a game worthy of the uberstyle that Gaga herself represents. Without giving too much away, fashion and music will feature highly in the game, along with re-imagining of many of the current gaming themes on the maket, but with a Gaga-twist." There you go, yet another Thatguys exclusive. Love and Disco-Sticks, Richie XXX

Artist rendition of how Miyamoto actually sees the world. So recently he said: “I don’t think everything needs to be 3D, or that just because we’re seeing more 2D games now, that everything’s going to shift back to 2D. Instead, I think that what’s going on is that people are realizing the benefits of a 3D game, and at the same time, remembering what the benefits of 2D games were. When going 2D, you need the courage to not be so attached to visual appearance of the games and to really pursue the gameplay experience.” Interestingly this also reads well if you replace 2D for SD (Standard Definition/Poor-man's TV) “I don’t think everything needs to be HD, or that just because we’re seeing more SD games now, that everything’s going to shift back to SD. Instead, I think that what’s going on is that people are realizing the benefits of a HD game, and at the same time, remembering what the benefits of SD games were. When going SD, you need the courage to not be so attached...

Well the Hunk competition is over. After two years we've had no entries. This can be taken as proof that you can't trust the Machinima community. Fuck you Machinima community. Fuck you. How will the fanfiction guys fare? We're running another competition (wow now we're just like the official Mega Man site !). As you may well now, Wesker is to appear as a rip off DLC pish in Lost Planet 2. What we want to know is how did he get there? Feel free to dick around with the "Resident Evil Canon" as Capcom so frequently do but do make sure your fic. contains the following elements: 1) Barry Burton's daughters Polly and Moira. 2) Tits McGee from Dead Rising. 3) Dante slicing a whole train in half. 4) A non racist justification for Sheva's totally racist costume in RE5. 5) Jill and Rebecca talking about who they fancy in S.T.A.R.S. 6) Cheryl Jones' supplementary mission in it's entirety. 7) A recurring joke about how Mega Man is into Moir...

Oooh ooh you have to shoot civilians! Boo hoo! It's all a bit morally challenging. SHUT UP. SHUT UP MW2 PRICKS. Nobody gives a shit anymore because we talking bout MUTHAFUCKING TOFU: You can shove your DLC, your customisable characters, your Valve Pish, your Fallout 3 stories. It's over. End of day. Shut up shop. Time at the bar. This is it people. Nobody does games with Tofu in them like Capcom. Review of Darkside Chronicles based on the single above screenshot : Game of the year. Game of the year. End of. Game of the century even! It's got Tofu in it. What more do you want? Tofu. Can I say anymore? No. But I will and that it muthafucking Tofu up in this muthafucking, muthafucka.

Sorry guys, look like our fantasy of being taken over by robots and molested and dissected for pure mechanical fiends' entertainment isn't going to be this year. Look like all so Scy-Fy (yeah!) writers were wrong again. Robots have only just learned, been programmed, become remotely controllable worked out how to do corners so that Pac Man can be played very very slowly . Sadly this means sex robots are still at least 1500 years away people :(

Was the front page news the Metro was running today. Is it the first ever gaming news front page in a publication with semi-decent circulation? Probably. Anyway to the story as reported by the Metro. One gamer, cut off by MS had this to say: "I was gutted, completely gutted. It's like telling someone their dog's just died" Our thoughts on this. 1) Why is only people in newspapers say gutted. They are always gutted about things in newspapers but we all know nobody actually says gutted since the late 90s. 2)It is not like telling someone their dog just died because normally dogs last longer than a console generation, you can play with your dog any time regardless of whether you are connected/Xbox is working, you can entertain more than two people with a dog at any one time without having to set up Rock band, people know what a dog is, a dog is fully compatible with any dogs you may already have, girls are interested in dogs, you can take your dog outside or on holiday ...

As if you needed more reasons to not play your Wii, here are 2 massive ones: Ant and Dec Fig. 1. Ant and Dec are playing Mario Kart, as you can see they are also making racist Asian faces, furthering their racist stereotyping, they are likely playing badly. Fig. 2. Ant and Dec are amused that the DS has 2 screens. Fig. 3. Ant and Dec playing with the Wii balance board, I couldn't think of anything funny here... Just observe their massive shiny foreheads and perhaps pretend they are making "NEEEEOOOW" Aeroplane noises  For those of you who don't know (i.e. outside of the UK) Ant and Dec are a TV presenting duo lacking any sort of talent. They are huge corporate cash-ins who are involved in pretty much every reality show in some shape or form. There is very little spark of life left in their eyes, further likening them to a money driven automatons and I'm sure you can envision where you insert the cash. Cheating Cockba...

And this years most underwhelming promotion in video games goes to.... ... ... ... *Rustles envelope* ... ... A quiet hush captures the ceremony ... ... Congratulations Bayonetta!!! Nobody cares. Love and hugs. I find Mr Vaz's Modern Warfare outrage arousing, Richie X

Yeah well, we cant really call ourselves a gamer website without mentioning this. Consider it mentioned. Oh and by the way, Makro have it for £20, that's the cheapest in the UK. Love and Hugs, Right between the eyes Richie X

Theif and MP Keith 'clueless' Vaz, having got over being ridiculed for various tedious and hyperbolic lambasting of games based on no evidence whatsoever once again gets in the Daily Mail off the back of "outrage" at a big game launch this time over Modern Warfare 2. Read all abaaaaat it here "Outrage as new video game lets players kill civilians in terror attacks". Bored, bored, bored. Surely Mr Vaz has more important things to be sorting out? Or maybe he could plough back all that money he skimmed from the tax payer into fixing Leicester before attacking games? Change the tune Vaz. You're so out of your depth once again. How about instead of knee jerking every time you want a bit of press coverage, you do some proper research into the non issues you soap box? God knows the UK government is so shit at supporting the games industry, to be even more damaging when you make moronic comments is insult to injury. Do you want to drive the gam...

So am I looking forward to Dragonage? You bet I fucking am! Its a huge expansive RPG on the 360!! (And some other platforms I think Sony's will run it. And I believe if you have a PC bought in the last 45 minutes it should run). Admittedly its a middle-earthy RPG with Orcs and Elves and whatnot, however Oblivion (the other middle-earthy RPG on the 360) has redeemed my faith that these archetypes no longer belong to Tolkien-fappers (Dwarves are just the right height to chow down on my "Garden of Elrond"*), Blizzard, and D&D mouth-breathers. Anyway I'm gonna lube up and find my industry contacts and get this game before Friday assuming I'm not too humiliated or the welts are still open. *Yes this is referring to lady bits, see we're not sexist we know that girls fap over obscure images too. DragonLove, DragonRichie XX

Yes people an exclaimed SIGH! This is the cause of the now doubly exclaimed sigh!!. We are literally sitting two clicks away from a whole section on wikipedia called List of Disney video games by genre Mickey Mouse Series.

The other day we were reading the TGAM archives and laughing out loud at ourselves. Out loud. That’s pretty wrong no? But it was when we were reading the TGAM archives that we realised that WE ARE FUCKING GAMING CELEBRITIES! Yes folks, without actually knowing it we went from mediocrity to gaming celebrity stardom. Like that news about the goose that levelled up and became a swan that time. Here is the story about how we discovered we were celebrities (this will probably be in our second autobiography when we publish our book now we are gaming celebrities). We got a link on Kotaku once and not one of those news stealing links a proper link for creating something unique. Our best friend totally met Pentadact , secretly James secretely Tom at University. He even emailed him to check and Tom emailed back. What a nice chap. We insult Richard Cobbett on a regular basis and he doesn’t even hate us. We interviewed that photographer who did the Devil May Cry shoot for Front magazine. We are...

So our good firends over at the Zeonic Front have gone and made a nice photo shgop edit of bayonetta, in proportion! Well done: Yeah we concur, the proportions of she-dante were totally out of whack! Regarding Bayonetta, we have been wrestling (in a non-homosexual way, we just finish each other off in the showers afterwards) over this title for a while. You see it DOES look good, there are some classy Dante-esque manoeuvres, and we all love Devil May Cry. But despite the fact that the DMC genre is not ripped off that much *looks in Kratos' direction*, it is SEGA that is doing the ripping off, and well SEGA suck, they have done nothing but 3/10 forgettable trashy cash-ins. I just cant get excited about this game, ultimately I feel it will be an underwhelming disappointment, Too much hype, to much focus on inferred nudity (and I'm usually a fan, though it helps if their head is not tiny), and too much focus on how great it is gonna be. Anyone else feeling this...

NB: Some things aren't good enough for that other site we occassionally write for . And then sometimes we forget we've some stuff that doesn't get published and then it becomes out of date and then we post it here. Here is one such fine post. You may all be delighted to have heard of the recent appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the first female, first Scot and first openly bisexual person to become the poet laureate of the United States of the Kingdom of the UK. Congrats to Carol. Good job. But what does a poet laureate actually do you may ask? Aside from being a staple answer to a pub quiz question (and with three firsts Carol Ann Duffy will be the answer to trivial pursuit questions for many many years to come) a poet laureate composes poetry for state events as well as being a spokesperson for poetry. To disseminate its worth and to kindle the eternal flame of poetry at all costs. After all, there are few forms of media that will help you to get laid, 'I directed...

Those of you living in the United Kingdom Emirates may have seen a couple of the recent Fallout 3 GOTY edition TV spots. This makes a refreshing change from the constant Wii adverts. We looked for a relevant video on Youtube but there are so many gameplay videos it was tricky to find. So instead we're going to go back in time to 1950 and explain the advert using only words *. THE GUY WHO DOES ALL THE VOICEOVERS FOR AMERICAN ACTION FILMS : Play Fwallout 3 NOW! 2 second clip of someone doing a head shot. 2 second clip of someone hitting someone with something else. 2 second clip of someone having an explosive device thrown at them. 2 second clip of someone having something [indistinguishable] violent done to them in slow motion. THE GUY WHO DOES ALL THE VOICEOVERS FOR AMERICAN ACTION FILMS : Gwame of the Ywear Edition out No[Gravel, gravel, Gravel]w. 1 second shot of credits. End. Now we're all for televisual adverts for great games but is the advert really capturin...

Yeah it happened... Delay #1 Where it was previously set for October 23rd UK release. It is now set for a November 13th release. No news on any new characters... so it looks like we are just on the usual set of DBZ characters, with a few of the movie characters. Though there are rumours circulating of around 4 or 5 extra characters. Which logically will be Hercule (Comedic character), Cell Jr (Spawns of Cell), Saibamen (Little green aliens the Saiyans use) and Janemba (The big bad that fought Goku and Vegeta's combined form, Gogeta, who has already been confirmed, though I suspect that SS3 Broly might be his adversary [interesting, maybe we can get SS3 Gogeta?]). On a personal note. I would like them to return all the previous characters from previous games, GT aside there was plenty of interesting "What-if" scenarios in the previous games such as Goku and Hercule fusion (Gocule) Tien and Yamcha fusion (Tiencha) and even the addition of the original Dragonball charac...

An Elder Scrolls book : Fuck that shit, get the finger out on Elder Scrolls V! Stop fannying about with Fallout 3 DLC! Jesus... What we're all thinking, Richie V

Internet fiend and Leaderboard legend the Hockster just gave us the tip-off about the new Resident Evil 4 HD version. We're pretty sure this is breaking so you'll see it in a TTECNK on lesser sites soon. Here is the original: Here is Resident Evil 4 HD. You can see that Capcom, fingers burnt from Resident Evil 5, have played it safe and set the whole thing in Asia land. Can't racist yourself! Except you are being racist if you just racist yourself and not everyone. Try again Capcom.

Gaming is trying hard to be mainstream, even though it already is but not in the way many gamers gamers can appreciate because they are too busy grinding and cyberring to spend enough time in the real world. A world without elves and muscle men and barrels and princesses and invisible walls. One thing that might help the deluded to believe that gaming is more mainstream is if we create some Gaming Celebrities. That way we join the common woman by slating off how fat, ugly, beautiful, stylish, hideous and underweight our favourite gaming people are and we can OMG to our hearts delights every time Jeff Minter takes a crap and it makes headlines. Our part in all this is to interview the top 100 gaming celebrities pushing them from blogosphere obscurity to the heady heights of celebrity and maybe see them take part in ice skating, ballroom dancing and orgies-on-islands television programmes like real celebrities do. This is not Leigh Alexander. We emailed over 500 gaming celebs and...

HA, this isn't really an update, but more of or crazy conspiracy theory that Kotaku may be "the man" and he is keeping thatguys down, mainly through subliminal hits and Machiavellian conduct. But also sapping and impurifying the precious bloggily fluids with their fluidic and readable posts. It goes all the way back to Jesus, man! 'Kotaku' in Sanskrit means nothing more than "wanks over graphical representations of girls/boys with exaggerated eyes and which have possible insinuations that they are not of age of consent". And of course any layman can see this is synonymous with the church, which in-turn are synonymous with the fabled Illuminatti. The Illuminati...blah, blah, blah... Dan Brown is Brian Crecente...blah, blah, blah...Moses was the original top-ten list Blogger...blah, blah, blah...4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42...blah, blah, blah, yakity, smakity...Is nothing more than biased media dictating what we should and shouldn't like. That aside, yet a...

Warning Gibberish: Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta!!! He's in the game and I'm a happy man. Currently the game is set for a UK release on 23rd of October... I still highly doubt it... Laters, SS3 RichieXX

It's Monday okay! Much easier to bash out a dirty top ten than it is to do any actual thinking. Here are our top ten characters to get you 'there' if your current humpee ain't doing it no more. 1) Q Bert 2) Merchant from RE4 3) Zangief 4) Lickitung 5) Ms Pac Man 6) Aeris (dead). 7) Zelda as Sheik. 8) That tranny from Neir. 9) The gorilla dude, above, from Alex Kidd when he loses a game of paper, scissors, stone (and also his undies) 10) Murdered maidens in Tenchu. All of these are tried and tested winners according to our girlfriend.

Yet again the technology companies are pushing the technology that we didn't want or even ask for. PSPGo has been creating some headlines with some rolling their eyes and others heralding the dawn of the package-less game. Like they did with mobile games. And all those other times. If you are anything like us, you have some severe reservations about it all. One of them being that the average person who plays games doesn't buy games mags, they don't even know about metacritic , they probably don't follow gaming blogs, the still go to the high street to buy their games and they probably haven't even taken their console online and if they have they probably have not downloaded any games let alone check the new releases every week. This is the average gamer. These are the people that saw the Wii soar to the heady heights. This is not your average forum lurker. This is not your average office of game journos. This is why many many great games perform underwhelmin...