That guy's a Maniac...

Since 66% of this blog is situated in Scotland, and I am actually in the games Industry, I suppose we are expected to comment on this one. For those of you who don't know, APB flopped, and as such RTW went into administration. Now, did anyone NOT see this one coming? I certainly saw this... not as a pessimistic prediction, more a painfully apparent inevitability. I have seen many people come and go from this company, each time I would pose the question, "why, realtime worlds?". Just to be met with an almost blind ignorance that this company could 'do no wrong', when specifically they were working on a supposed WoW-killer MMO. An ambitious task, anyone would agree. And the premise of this WoW-killer? Cops and Robbers. Realtime worlds I roll my eyes at thee. Though I do have to tip my hat to them, during the time (years) leading up to the launch they did manage to create some hype about a 'GTA-like MMO' (lies), and at one point made micro-transactions s...

Last weekend was my stag do, which was organised by my gay partner, Richie! Unlike your traditional stag do there was not a stripper in sight. Or going out. At all. Instead it was this groom to be and his bezzy mates playing the games that we all grew up with. I couldn't have asked for a better stag do, I laughed until I cried, I drank until it hurt and we had one last gaming session with all my Slads in one (well, two rooms). Sadly on Sunday I realised this would probably be the last time we'd all be together with nothing but time for playing the games that we cut our teeth on. But enough of the gay stuff! AWARDS TIME! Group Awards. CLICK FOR BIG IMAGE. This will mean very little if you weren't there. Some of the games that came out: Quake 2, Mashed, Mario Kart, Boom Blox, Geometry Wars, Resident Evil 5, Timesplitters 2, Puzzle Fighter, Blazblue, Street Fighter IV, Soul Calibur, Pod Racer, Red Faction Guerilla, Wii Sports, Army of Two and even a spot of doorsies. The weeke...

Crazy summoned Demon hands to rip apart any wrongdoers, man that would be an awesome skill to have the next time someone tries to sell me the Big Issue. Seriously though, Dragon Age 2 Đ

You gotta love the rabbids. They represent that idiotic, goofy childishness that used to be the heart blood of gaming on the NES and Mega Drive. This should be the last sexy image on TGAM for a while now.

I have had a recent campaign to "thousand" quite a few of the games on my 360 list. I have completed Dragon Age: Awakenings and the Expansions (1550 GP), along with a couple of other titles too (Nothing cheaty like Avatar or King Kong though). Rather dauntingly I decided to start up Final Fantasy XIII with intent of thousanding it, I've invested serious amounts time into previous Final fantasy games, why not do it with this one? Because endgame sucks... I have pretty much run out of things to do except grind... I have spend 60 hours on the game I have completed 62/64 missions ( I have decided to leave the remaining 2 missions until I fill out the crystarium AKA get to the maximum level) and well, if I complete mission 64 it makes the grinding process slower. So I'm sitting on 720 gamerpoints:  I'm missing 6 achievements *SPOILERS* Adamant will: Killed an Enemy that spawns after mission 64 Masters Seal: Maxed everyone's roles. Treasure H...

Thousand Verb to thousand ( third-person singular simple present thousands , present participle thousanding , simple past and past participle thousanded ) ( transitive ) ( Gaming ) To finish all achievements/Trophies; to make done; to reach the end of the required achievements/trophies. NB: Is not necessarily used in context of the number "one thousand", as expansions, live arcade and multiplayer achievements add/subtract form the total. You're a participle. Love and transitive hugs, Richie X

We're less angry today but we spent yesterday evening watching cutscenes from Metal Gear Solid 4 which made us angry again. Let me explain. Back when I wrote this post I did a lot of research into the top rated games for each platform. Obviously for two of the consoles this was a bit of a task. For the PS3 it was much easier due to the paucity of quality exclusive games on the platform but I kept seeing Metal Gear Solid 4 come up again and again. I was concious that we might get some backlash from people arguing that MGS 4 should have been on the PS3 list but then remembered that Duffin and Richie haven't played it. So that accounts for 100% of our readership. My relationship with Metal Gear Solid began at the PlayStation one and ended with watching my brother play through 2. So I decided last night to ruin a game I was unlikely to play by watching a couple of cutscenes. At the time MGS4 came out I looked at it and thought it was pretty much going to be more of the same but I...

Another hundred video game forums retread the same six questions about the Wii. We occasionally engage in a handful of forums until we realise why we stopped the last time. The flavour of the last five years on console forums is to discuss the death of the Wii. The death of third party support. The death of core gaming. The death of non HD gaming. Over and over again. The same arguments backed up with time honoured gut feeling and rhetoric. This heroic poster over at neogaf, Hunahan writes what I would were I not making dick jokes or getting angry at the dumbness of the gaming community. What? There's tons of third party support. At almost every given moment of this generation, there has been more third party games for Wii than for any other system on the market. Let's just cut to the real question. What you're really asking is why the Wii doesn't have the next big installments of Resident Evil, GTA, JRPG XIII, Platinum Games Presents, Castlevania Of War, or whatever t...

For no reason whatsoever we decided to watch all of Consolevania and Videogaiden . It's all over though. It's all finished. A couple of years ago. This video about the Scottish games industry is brilliant I think. Sums it all up. This time of year we always get a bit melancholy. I'm sure we'll get over it but right now we'd be hard pressed to recommend gaming to anyone. It's meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Throaway culture created purely for the generation of income. Sad face.

Readers of this here blog will notice that aside from posts about pokemon, vibrating attachments for various mp3 players and a love hate relationship with achievements is that we occasionally begrudge getting told what's next. Already there's stifled hype for the next generation leaking out all over the place. Iwata has started the Wii 2 hype train with typical no news statements and as usual the shit eaters are eating it up. There's no discerning or questioning here. Something new? Give it to me. Give me something new they say. SO this current generation has had longer than most but that's a pretty arbitrary measurement of how 'good we've had it'. Richie and I often theoretically talk about educating a complete non gamer in the way of games. We compile a big old list of all the games that really add something new or show off the best of video games. Our hypothetical non gamer has to play through them all chronologically and at the end is given a certificat...

We strive against gender inequality in games and at the same time for more freedom of choice and to be treated with respect as adults who heathily enjoy video games. But then as soon as a game gives us the freedom to take screenshots anywhere we take images like this. Part of us wishes that we were uploading this with irony. Another part of us is instantly going to bookmark this page under 'email support'. On second thoughts our partners might need email support one day. Is it worse to try and hide this from our loved ones? If I'm going to do it anyway would you preffer to find it under "Crystal Chronicles Selkie sexy look"? Answers in the comments. Who's worse, the people who code and animate this stuff? Or the people who take these screenshots and upload them to a blog? because frankly, there's no innocently discovering that you could do this. At some point we made the concious decision to take these shots. Of course now that I'm writing this post I ...

Ready-Up are hiring so we sent them a job application. Well, I say a job application, it was exactly this one . We're quietly confident. However, because we had to go and visit Ready-Up to find the details about applying for the job we noticed a few things on the application form. A rare opportunity is available to work on the UK’s fastest growing gaming community website. Ah, fastest growing. That immeasurable indefinable measure of success. And it is a pure lie. We just visited www.thatguys.co.uk for the first time this morning which takes our growth from 0 visitors at 9am to 1 visitor at noon. That's growth of MORE THAN INFINITY. We're the fastest growing gaming community more like. Applicants must have solid spelling and grammar. Shit. We missed this on the application form. Abort. Abort. Here are our future work colleagues and a free bonus game! There are five 'woulds' and three 'wouldn'ts' can you work out which are which? Don't worry TGAM read...