That guy's a Maniac...

If you believe the moronic notions of some of the bigger internet games """"journalists""" and seasoned developers then the Nintendo Wii , aside from having the dust continuously wiped from it is now a legacy platform. You know, now that the Wii -U hasn't even been released yet. Anyway, judging from the output on the Nintendo Channel the hype might be true. This is what we find odd about the Nintendo Channel. It is essentially a marketing tool for Nintendo products that comes with every Wii and according to the software data there's at least 500,000 players that watch it. That being said, the coverage is inconsistent at best. A number of promotional series have started and then abruptly been discontinued (the Warioware and Monster Hunter ones spring to mind) and since ONM have been in charge of the 'regular' Nintendo News episodes the quality has been very hit and miss. The recent E3 round ups were pants and there hasn't b...

Well we've spent about 20 hours with Xenoblade Chronicles and overall we're enjoying it. First up is that you can download twelve tracks for free when you register the game with Nintendo which is nice. Something for nothing (well, for £40 but hey). Is it one of the best jRPGs or even RPGs of this generation as many reviews have been claiming? Possibly, but there are a few gripes even very early in. 1) Sound Bites. The noises that your party makes during battle get repetitive very quickly. They start repeating after about one battle. I'm sure that as the party expands you'll get to hear some more lines but how did nobody spot that it is irritating to hear the same phrases over and over again? It is grating and somewhat undermines the fiction of the game unless your characters are supposed to have short term memory loss or a total lack of imagination when it comes to battle cries. 2) TITS. Currently, the best armour for the female in the party seems to be a pair ...

Mad Catz are getting more and more credibility these days, i remember the days when 4 people sat round a console and "player 4" got stuck with the cheapy 3rd party controller that everyone dreaded. That controller used to be made by Mad Catz. Now they have released these controllers specifically for the gaming elite, for the "pro-gamers" allowing for things like interchangeable team plates. But most excitingly interchangeable D-Pad/Thumbsticks, making the 360 more like the PS3 controller, and vice versa. I'm still pining for this, 5 years on from getting the 360 I still prefer the DualShock PlayStation layout. However what bothers me about this incarnation and the thought and process put into it is that the 360 D-Pad seems the same. I really really fucking despise the 360 D-Pad, and have done from the start, firstly it's in the wrong place, though this is fixable on this gaypad, but it frequently just does not function well. It suffers from I-pr...

Shock horror, dismay and tears. Over the past ten years of playing pokemon there were certain things that caused me dismay, the battery on "Red" depleted loosing all the hours spent on that. Telling doppelganger to get Pokemon, then further down the line him thrashing me in a 6v6 battle. And most recently, Taking my DS on holiday with Pokemon Black. I lost it, I left it on the plane, I spoke with KLM several times to see if it had been handed in, but no :( it's lost... gone... stolen... moved on... It is... no more Well it's not the worst thing in the world, the DS can be replaced, I may even get the 3DS for the hell of it. The thing that bothers me most is Pokemon Black and the time I invested. Along with that I have lost my Celebi, Zoroa, Zoroark, and Victini. Several event-only (i.e. time-sensitive) Pokemon, Zoroa and Victini were actually ones I was using when going through the game too! So, i dont know, do I play through the game again? do I ju...

I only recently found out about Project Rainfall from that homo-du-jour Jayjay-Fahid Sulley, editor of a little website called videolamer we used to write for. Turns out Nintendo of America hates JRPGs. With a passion. Amazingly, there are currently no plans to release The Last Story , Xenoblade Chronicles and some other emo game in the United States of America. Crazy news huh? I thought Europe had it bad but Another Code R and the awesome Disaster Day of Crisis didn't get stateside either. I guess it's because Nintendo don't want people playing the old Wiis with Wii-U around the corner. God forbid people keep buying games for one of the best selling consoles of all time. That would be insanity. Can't wait for this crap though. Give me a poorly controlled generic cockney simulator over some crappy japanese games anytime you muggy bint.

Part 1 is here. This may be why the Escapist continues to be so shit. Here be a few gems from the Reddit: Robomonkster in response to the escapist claiming the crunch has caused strain: How are they 'feeling the crunch' with that many fucking ads? Have they found the other end of the online ad-revenue bell-curve, where they spend more money on the bandwidth for them than the ads bring in? Amen to that even if I did have a desire to sift through their poorly designed website through all that crap to find some theoretical gems the constant ads would drive me away. As it is I try other ways of watching Zero Punctuation so i don't have to visit the site and get inundated with advertising before, after, above, below and around and content. Acid Super Sam : "I respect the Escapist" Nooooo ho ho. What kind of person says that. Why god why?

That see it rise above the crap that has outsold it. I recently completed it so it only took me just over a year . It's a really good game . We aren't good enough with words to express it. It's a great game even are there words to express better than great? Here are eight little touches that, for me, made it a really greatastic game and why my heart is made heavy with the knowledge that we won't see a game quite so beautifully crafted or surprisingly fresh for a long time. 1) Detail in everything . Everything from collectibles to the snippets that your civilians will offer up in conversation through to incidental details in the cutscenes draw the eye. It's all been lovingly crafted to reward players who will care to look for those tiny little details. 2) Naughtiness . Not as in, lame pre-watershed sex scenes or characters who stream cusses but genuine naughtiness. Citizens send you rude notes , perhaps my favourite of which is a letter rating the princesses (O...

No thanks to our interview five years ago . We remained true. STILL A SHALLOW GAME THOUGH. In other news. Hey, hey remember Resident Evil? That was pretty cool right? In Raccoon City and stuff and and the one in Spain with the non zombies. That was pretty cool. Hey you remember when, like the only thing that would make Resident Evil better was loads of shitty dialogue that actually takes itself seriously and generic S.A.S bullshit and ziplines and helicopters and terrorists and all that boring generic military crap that nobody finds cool? No. We don't either .

Earlier today I picked up a copy of Ready Player One. A little bit less earlier today I put it down. Finished. It's a really great book. Okay, so the set-up is a little flawed to engineer characters fourty years in the future with the geek sensibilities of a 2011 late-twenties-early thirties geek but it's forgivable. This book gives hope to geeks everywhere who may take solace in a scenario (albeit fictional) that actually makes use of all that knowledge of books, films and games that we have to save the world.

In today's Observer Carole Cadwalladr (who?) writes part of her column on the interesting statistic that wikipedia is a very mael dominated site. Fair enough. She then however, equates this to men controlling human knowledge (wikipedia's version of it). Pathetically she compares the word count on the page for menstruation against Star Trek and gender inequality against William Shatner. Something Awful have been covering the patheticness of wikipedians for a long time and to be frank, a lot better than award winning Carole's attempt. To look at these statistics and come to the pithy conclusions she does and to try to equate this to equality is special pleading of the kind reserved for Sunday newspaper columnists struggling to make up the word count for their articles. Wikipedia is written by volunteers. Draw conclusions about what men do with their free time as compared to women (shopping? being duped by cosmetic adverts? shoes?), fine. But men controlling knowledg...

AI in video games is often an oxymoron. Developers will boast about their superior AI and in the days when games came in boxes you might even seen it as a bulletpoint on the back- Most advanced AI ever! Yet with sad predictability chances are within ten minutes of playing you'll see a man with a gun take cover on the wrong side of a sand bag or take time out of the hell-on-earth battlefront to inspect a wall for ten minutes. One of our favourite moments of AI failure was when playing the original Red Faction on the PlayStation 2 (maybe?). The last remaining guard in a unit of 6 claimed to have us surrounded. Surely, you can program a guy to not come out with that particular sound bite when he is the only one in the room no? However, FPS AI is the drooling propellor hatted idiot when compared to thinking men's games, particularly RTSs. Recently, I was bested on a map on "retro" game Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. The map was Point Stormy if you know it. Image from Wars...

So a while ago I was really excited about Marvel vs Capcom 3. After completing it a couple of times I grew tired of it, after pondering why, given that I love the characters and also Capcom games, I think it was just shallow. Short of a ladder to fight over and over and some unlocks, which are either crappy gallery things, or the hidden characters, which can be gotten in a couple of hours. In short, completed it once, unlocked the characters, and that was me done with it. Then Mortal Kombat came along. I had been a fan of the original Mortal Kombat since disk swapping it on the Amiga. Though I ignored many of the 3D iterations, MK4, Armageddon and Deception. The latest Mortal Kombat is great! Primarily because they brought back all the retro fighters and moves, but also because it had more depth than MvC3! I'm going to say it, Marvel versus Capcom 3 is a shallow game! Mortal Kombat has over 300 challenges, story mode, and some worthy alternate costumes to unlock. ...

Yes people with astonishing predictability at least one newspaper is saying the riots in London are inspired by GTA. First of all this is idiotic. GTAIV is now three years old. Secondly, you can't 'riot' in GTA. Almost as soon as you set something on fire, the fire engines turn up and the police show godlike tenacity and initiative when you start a crime spree. Perhaps we should get our police officers and firemen to play GTA and it might inspire them to be more effective? Secondly, this is yet another example of sloppy reporting by the media. These riots were clearly inspired by 1999's Urban chaos, where gangs take to the streets to fuck things up and: The 2002 game State of Emergency. And look! It's by Rockstar, the same purveyors of such filth as Bully, GTA, Table Tennis and Manhunt. Do your fucking research you lazy media cunts.

Xenoblade Chronicles. Here be the trailer. What's not to love? It's got more than a little bit of Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers about it, two games which I like a lot. Talking to a couple of gaming pals about it, their response has been "since when did you like JRPGs?". A fair question. I don't and I don't normally like games with Xeno in the title. But I do like big open games with a sense of environment and it looks like great care has been taken over the setting. Finally! A game I'm actually excited about. Let's hope it doesn't dissappoint.

I have holiday and I've been trying to bust as many games that I've half started as possible. Kirby's Epic Yarn A lovely little game that appeared quite easy to 100%. I was wrong. Clocked it in at just under 20 hours in the end. Stupidly, I left all the challenges until the end so the last hours or so was just burning through the repetitive and sometimes tricky challenges. Soundtrackwise, many of the new tracks are as sublime as the classic old tracks. Fun. Little King's Story I'd put Little King's Story on the back burner for a long time. Typically because when I play it I get sucked in so I don't attempt to play it unless I know I have time free. It's a game that still gives even late on where lesser games tend to add all the padding. It is also still challenging although I do end up restarting a lot because I'v become very attached to a little hunter of mine called Stella. She was one of my first citizens, she's married to a guard and has ...

That time of year again. Another stupid gaming awards ceremony. The problem with game awards is that they try to be like film awards but games don't really work like that. Let's have a look at the UltimateGOTY nominations: Sad face just doesn't cover it. Maybe the selection isn't that bad it's just well, this screenshot says everything doesn't it? Is this it? Is this what we'd be dreaming next generation was going to be delivering? Here's the same selection with sequels and remakes taken out. Two interesting but flawed games. Do that excercise again but only keeping PC games, or downloadable games or pah. Same old arguments. Unlike films, there are a bazillion games released every year and I know that my personal choices don't overlap with everybody's but there are a few outstanding issues. What's with the categories? Either have categories that work or just make em up. I know I'd never put Portal 2, Dead Rising 2 and Little Big Planet 2...

You may have read this story last week about the tragic death of a 20 year old killed by deep vein thrombosis, supposedly from playing Halo online (ODST? Reach? The original?). You can predict how the rest of the story goes. The parents say they thought it was safe, Microsoft point to that small print that comes with their console, in the instruction booklet for every single game and even flashes up as a message in many games "Time to take a break kids". My initial response was that long stints of doing anything causes all kinds of medical problems but a friend pointed out that even if you were reading a book for twelve hours straight you'd move around more than if you were gaming. Nothing else exists like gaming to fix your attention so avidly. Dead arms, pins and needles and head rushes are par for the course for gamers and chillingly, this story reminded me of marathon sessions in my youth. Fortunately, necessity means I don't have time for hours and hours of play...

Barry Burton nipples.