That guy's a Maniac...

The last panel in this week's triptych about Wiiblindness in the games industry. In the last part I already mentioned EDGE. EDGE 227 has a largely thoughtful article about online multiplayer in games raising all the interesting points around when and why online multiplayer is shoe-horned into a game (e.g Dead Space 2), whether it's devs, marketeers or the consumers who are responsible for more and more games shipping with online multiplayer and the curious mystery around the virtual non existence of crossplatform onlinemultiplayer with one not so notable exception. For no discernable reason not a single Wii game, nor the console itself is mentioned even when it may be pertinent to. Sure, the console is still widely viewed as the little engine that couldn't but it's a glaring omission not to mention Mario Kart Wii when testing 2009 titles for how active communities are. That's a three year old game that not only still has an active community but also a title that get

EDGE magazine isn't just the thinking gamer's read, in our opinion it's one of the few 'publications' that transcends insulting and is actually written for people above the age of nine. By comparison, half of the shit on the web and virtually every other gaming mag falls somewhere between the Beano and the National Enquirer. However, one of the problems with a cross platform publication is that each issue can only offer a limited number of pages to each platform. Increasingly this has meant that every platform but the Wii gets coverage. In this month's issue E227 only one of the 23 games reviewed and previewed is a Wii game. Last month only two of the 24 games were Wii games. Now of course, it pleases more of the demographic,more efficiently to look at the cross-platform games !PS3, PC,Xbox 360) but the truth is that there ain't that much on the horizon . It seems that when Capcom or Nintendo aren't making Wii games, nobody is. Why is that Nintendo magi

There's been a blitz of Wii bashing and just ignorant the platform recently. It's a bit stupid really and recalls times when the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube were prematurely abandoned, the former platform killed off in it's prime and the latter sticking two fingers to Microsoft and Sony with Resident Evil 4. So it appears to begin with the Wii. The first bit of bashing comes from Frank Gibeau, head of the EA Games label describing the Wii as a legacy platform (via Industry Gamers ). "They [Nintendo] understand the dynamics and the fact that HD consoles is a booming part of business right now. Legacy platforms like PS2 and the Wii have dropped off significantly. They’re not stupid. They’re going to figure something out. They’re going to come back at it." Is the kind of moronic rhetoric that gets our goat. What he actually means is that nobody, especially EA have been able to replicate Nintendo's success on it's own console and it is language like this that m

We're not just interested in games we're interested in the cultural products that surround games and gaming. One of which is machinima, essentially films made in game engines. The problem is 99% of it is absolute shit. There are a few gems out there; Red vs Blue , War of the Servers and Trashmaster . Machinima can also be funny (see Top FPS ) and there's even been a decent CoD kill montage video that's been more than looking at a sniper scope with the odd numbers popping up, beautifully edited and link subsequently lost. The rest though is total bullshit. Here's a top tip to would be machinima directors out there, that if taken on board will improve the average quality of all machinima by at least 5%: Having one of your characters say LMAO, ROFL or LOL isn't in any way funny. Stop doing it and instnatly make the world a better place.

Is another brilliant and flawed but only brilliant because it is flawed wii game with more a more fresh feel than anything on release on the HD consoles. Playing it reminded me a lot of the awesome Shadow of Memories for the PS2 despite the fact they have nothing in common at all except they feature a guy. Just saying that's all. You play as Ray somebody who is an all American hero and former International Rescue Team member following a totally predictable tragedy. Ray depressed about the tragedy is now a pen pusher at the Crisis Managment Division until he gets called back in to service. The game follows a series of (not so outlandish it seems) events that start with an earthquake, then a tsunami, followed by a nuclear threat and then gets even more ridiculous with everything from firestorms, volcanic eruptions, floods, terrorist battles and even a lahar. BRING ON THE CHEESE. The game is so cheesy its hard not to smile or believe that the developers are unknowing in the cheesiness

Breaking News:  Wii 2 (Codenamed Project Cafe) has had it s specs Leaked  "the console will include a custom IBM PowerPC CPU with three cores, a GPU from the ATI R700 family with a shader unit at version 4.1, and at least 512Mb of RAM. Backwards compatibility with both the Wii  and GameCube games.  The controller has a six-inch touch screen, a front-facing camera, D-Pad, two bumpers, two triggers. There you have it HD DS in  your living room. FINALLY HD! More on this as more rumours flood the internets Love and HD-Hugs, Richie X

I've been wanting to play Deadly Creatures since it came out way back in 2009. The premise is simple you play as a Desert hairy scorpion and a Texas brown tarantula and go about Arachnida business somewhere in the desert of the southwestern United States. The game is fucking brilliant and also flawed, totally linear but the game drives you on just because you want to see what's next. The game is also incredibly frustrating and right up to the end, death is only ever around the corner leading to occasional rage when a checkpoint is the wrong side of an unskippable cutscene in particularly tough sections. There's some odd reusing of the same level, a particular section of which you return to on four occasions and later level design tends towards laziness with invisible walls stopping you from wandering off piste. Also jarring is the end FMV sequence which is of appallingly low quality. Play alternates between the tarantula and the scorpion, the former is by far the best one

Sarah Kaye, buying manager for Tesco airs her ideas here. Our ideas although we don't get paid for them like Sarah does would be to hire someone who knows about games, I'm sure that £3 piece of shit PC games, DS shovelware and Carnival Games have a strong retail record but visiting the games section in supermarkets makes us want to bring in a pack lunch and spend the whole day fending people away from the bad games. "You don't want to buy this game it's free on the internet". "I don't give a shit if Dora is an explorer or not go and play Shadow of the Colossus". Our second tip is to try to keep the games aisle looking more like a nice sensible place to find games rather than looking like downtown Baghdad following an earthquake all the fucking time. One to four of the ' WTF Ten ' are the same game. Someone's put music CDs in the DS section and the Xbox games are stocked in reverse alphabetical order by game subtitle. The wii section

Apologies to regular readers but here is yet another angry rant about game retailers in the UK. Fortunately, most have been driven to extinction by failing to see the writing on the wall over a decade ago when online mega retailers could beat the high street specialists in choice, price and service. PLUS the only convenience that high street retailers offer is immediacy. I can pick up a game there and then and be playing it that day in theory. However, as a concerned citizen it saddens me to see the decline of the high street retailer. Last week I found myself with some extra money following my birthday and consulted 'the list'. Now, I'm an avid gamer. I've played thousands of games, own hundreds and write for three gaming blogs. However, I also have a fairly demanding job, a family, friends who I don't see half as much as I should, passions other than gaming and a hundred other little things that take up my time. Not only does this mean that those heady days and ni

Some really awesome and intreresting games lined up, and yes they are all Capcom, because we at thatguys.co.uk are "Fapcom canboys" First up Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City! Or REORC as the online community is dubbing it . It's another outing in Raccoon during the timeline of Resident Evil 2 (yay) and 3 even Nemesis is stomping about trying to find his S.T.A.R.S. cookies. Its a 3rd person shooter with some GoW physics. Cover, blindfire etc. reserving judgement till more has been released. Next Dead Rising : Off the record It's the what if scenario, if it had been Frank West rather than Chuck Greene in Dead Rising 2, how would it have gone. Overweight middle aged Zombie wrestling it seems. Finally Street Fighter X Tekken Some more details revealed about the fighting system, the huge character roster of " as many characters as we can humanly fit in ", and a DinoCrisis Stage (another one for that other blog ). Initially it just looks li

Ok the following is some rather impressive artwork! This is Fucking BAD-ASS!!!! Make it happen people! Love and Red Pyramid things, Richie X 

Well kind of real news. Maybe. Undercover Journalism Overhead by a very loud SCEE marketing dude: THE SONY NGP! UK price will be £129.99 Maybe. Possibly, or that will be another PSP price drop. There you have it, don't say we are not good to you, we'll let you know if we get a cease and desist letter. Fingers Xed Love and Mouthy Marketing, Richie X

Richie pointed me in the direction of this Wall Street Journal articl e (via a pretty piss poor editorial on the article at ripten). Now we were all geared up for writing a rebuttal but actually we did that over three years ago . Turns out that Kay Hymowitz has gone up in the world from turning trashy poorly researched diatribe on Dallasnews into a book called Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. Sadly, she didn't really use the time for any rewrites or even to update the references. If she can't be bothered then neither can we so Kay if you are reading this here's our tops tips to you getting a clue: 1) Read Replay A History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan and you'll realise that your trendy mac which you use to google yourself on as is virtually every piece of software you use is a product of gaming. Surely the hypocrisy of you using these technologies to disseminate your moronic ideas isn't lost on you? 2) Three years ago we'd alread

Ok so, we have all most likely seen the Awesome trailer of Kratos entering the Mortal Kombat Tournament. However who is the 360 getting on their system? Well rumours are *Spoilers* its... Green Lantern? Now, ok, I get it... Green, Xbox has green lights, the Green Lantern Movie is on the horizon, he was in in the previous game Mortal Kombat versus DC Universe. But, c'mon, he doesn't really fit in with the Mortal Kombat Universe. He's not the goriest of the DCU characters and ugh... Never mind... I give up. At least I'll have Sub-Zero to rip out his spine. Love and Sexuality, Richie X

The big 30. Who would have thought it? In this comic, SPOILERS Omastar uses surf. Click to embiggernate. Quicker than getting the bus I guess. That crazy fictional cephalopod. What will he think of next?

We're all hyped here about rumours that somebody will sometime soon mention a game. But don't click away because were going to be generating over 1000 posts of absolute fluff that if you're lucky will reveal one or two new features of a game. If you are unlucky we'll just spoil the game bit by bit for you over the coming months until it releases, stays in the shops for six days until that next new thing comes along! BREAKING!! Remember when we just brought you that breaking announcement about a possible game at some point in the future? Well anonymous sources have just confirmed that there will possibly be another game after that! Don't go anywhere and put up with our mid article advertisements as well as those poorly animated ones and the tit ones until we bring you the next article which pretty much says the same as this one but might have a screenshot. If we can be bothered we'll even try to crop out the IGN logo and post it within four hours of whoever publ

Finally it looks like Capcom are getting around to making the game we dreamed about waaaay back when just after our third visit to Raccoon and before that awful broken Outbreak business. Still, it's a far cry from a GTA-Raccoon City that we imagined and since Outbreak the zombie game has been taken in all kinds of directions with Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 4 and 5 and Dead Rising. From the looks of the above trailer they've gone for a PC FPS kind of vibe which we here at TGAM find thrilling for three rounds. Part of what made RE2 and 3 and even Outbreak so great was the sense of the city (before descending into underground laboratory madness). RE4 and RE5 really lost the sense of a location that used to be a living and working settlement. RE4 takes you through nonsensical shooting gallery locations after the first village and it's best if you don't think about the quite dull or ridiculous locales of RE5. Where would you head in a crisis? The hospital? The Town Hall? Th

We've been putting a lot of time into Pokemon Black and White. One of the best new(ish) features of the game is that now it is easier than ever to play online. All of the online bits from before are bundled in the new games almost to the point of inundation. Not all of the online functionality is up and running yet but there's still lots to do with the Global trade service the doesn't really work GTS negotiate, random WFC battle match-ups and the Wi-Fi battle subway. Problem is that most players seem to be lacking in imagination and if you spend the slightest bit of time online you'll end up seeing a lot of the same pokemon over and over again. For example, expect to battle endless Hydregion and Volcarono. Not only does this make the game very boring but now that there's more pokemon than ever it would be nice to see some teams that were mixing it up a bit. Yeah sure, picking the pokemon with better than average base stats lets you win easier but we could all be p

For reasons not entirely clear to me I was in the unfortunate position of watching OMG! With Peaches Geldof, Peaches Geldof's foray into the world of chat show TV which was not only destined to be canned as it rightly has been rumoured but is as awful as any sane person would imagine it to be. Amongst other vapid non-issues which the do-nothing, Fergie(the former Royal not that woman from Third Rock From The Sun who now sings with the Black Eyed Peas)'s-offspring-look-alike tackled in the latest show was gaming addiction. Tackled, show and fuck it every word in that sentence should have " " around it. Refreshingly, and part of the reason why I fought off the urge to smash the remote into my face until either the TV went off or I went blind and deaf, a lady gamer was invited onto the show to talk about her gaming addiction. The gamer whose name I forget was pitted against a guy, who represents the stereotype for internet gamers, in a couple of rounds of Left for Dead