That guy's a Maniac...

In ordered to be accredited with any kind of standing, or respect within the pseudo-community of gamers there is a plateau of geeky knowledge that is a standard, however as more and more niche corners become mainstream... On a side note I refer to this phenomenon as ironic-hipster-reversal ; bringing to attention obscure elements of information to appear more knowledgeable in a subject, yet unintentionally bringing it to the foray for everyone i.e. Wearing a a T-shirt with the konami code. Pay attention to this people, this level of marketing and advertising is more powerful than social media!  ...as I was saying as video-games-geeky-knowledge becomes more mainstream the level of knowledge to be respected within the community becomes more convoluted and obscure. There has always existed a level of this autistic desire within games culture, from the early days of imported rare japanese titles. But nowadays games culture has expanded to a respected and widely used ...

Chuff's back and he's backing down. He's compromising his principles and it's disgusting to watch. I would like to take this opportunity to whole heartedly apologise to fans of Mutant Mudds and all members of the Galactic Senate (not you ET, never you). When reviewing the aforementioned game I confess I was under severe pressure due to missing a year of deadlines, and was suffering from depression due to flashbacks of not handing in book reviews on time in Mrs Lawrence’s English class. This lead me make glaring errors in my reporting and missed out on a key feature that Mudds has that truly elevates this game to another level, I did not appreciate this during my first play through. Once again, I apologise. I genuinely do not realise how I came to miss this, there is an idle animation. Mutant Mudds: 9.5/10

Chuff's back. He's our man on mobile which has been pretending to do games for a long time . Over to Chuff_72. Look at this shit, does this look like the sort of game a tough Role Playing Mother Fucker like me would be into?  So for some reason (for any reason - AMERICA), I’ve been attracted to these really tough, unforgiving platformers that have been creeping into the App store. I really got into a game called League of Evil , smashed it, then smashed up the sequel, three starring the shit out of it BEFORE they nerfed all the completion times so your Mum (Mom) could finish it too while she’s rubbing one out (rubbing, furiously, there’s a squeaky noise and everything). It’s got some story. It’s about a boy who has an uncomfortably close relationship with his Granny who he keeps in the attic. Then Aliens happen.  The controls are pretty gross, a button* for up, down, left and right, NO DIAGONAL, because if the C64 taught us anything, it’s that pressing the ...

We know, we know . Yes you can touch it.

Woo doggy . We're even more internet famous than we were before.

Looks familiar .

This time of year our better half will go into a torpor and if left uninterrupted will sleep forever. A physiology we took advantage of, not like that, to get a couple of hours of gaming in and finally saw the credits of The Last Story . Looking at the Nintendo Channel stats for this game our playtime of just under 41 hours was almost double the time that the 1753 other players (who have allowed Nintendo to publish their data) spent on this game.  Other lesser sites also reported a playtime of 20 hours. So what kept us? Well this is a head scratcher because unlike other RPGs, The Last Story does an excellent job of cutting out the obligatory filler content. There are only a dozen or so different dungeons. Armour comes in six different flavours and is easily upgraded without epic or repetitive quests for rare materials. We honestly just spent all that extra time taking in Lazulis City, a hub city, that's probably up there with the best game places to just spend time soaking...

Another goading response from Team Ninja. Put simply there is a divide, and it can be sweepingly categorised into a generation/age. Devil may cry series has spanned over 10 years, and at each end of that spectrum it has picked up a selection of generational players, and frankly the younger/alternative kids (you know the ones that use terms like speed thrash metal) specifically liked it for the broody, angsty, gothy design. But some people liked the DMC series for its gaming style with a fun tacked demon stuff. Dante was iconic, as a character he appealed to a large audience. This new Dante is just a little too alternative to appeal to the spectrum he once appealed to, this video is the glacé cherry on top of the spiralled turd that was the "no-white-hair" announcement. Love and Ah fuck it, its not Dante, Richie X

This just in, stoic TGAM contributor Chuff_72 who hath spake the BIG ONE , Sold Out , and spake t h r i c e, wades into our flip flopping about PC Games to speak once more. Chuffty: I did not grow up owning a PC, but my best friend always had the most up to date system, 386, 486, Pentium etc, so I played all those games when they first came out; Wolfenstein , Frontier , X-Wing , Warcraft 2 , Dark Forces 2 , etc. Great times. Then at a certain point “Graphics Cards” and “ETC” came along and suddenly there was no standard PC anymore and everything stopped working. I didn’t touch a PC to play a game from about 1999 to 2004. In late 2004 I gave a mate £400 and asked for a PC that could play Dawn of War (“a good 40K game, holy shit take my money!”). My custom built PC died about a year and a half later, Limewire + 4gig of porn resulted in about 3000 viruses (literal, not figurative). After a deep cleanse the graphics card stopped working, at no point could I be arsed researching...

For those of you outside the UK the current weather may not seem like a topic for conversations lasting more than a couple of minutes. For the British however, it is a source of endless conversation particularly when the weather does surprisingly interesting things outside of the format: depressing rain.  Well now it's fucking snowing so productivity in the UK drops ten percent, not because, people have to stay at home because of death warnings and avalanches but because everyone takes the time to tell everyone they meet that "It is snowing", "It's cold" and endless details about the varying extent of the snow from their own areas and the areas they've heard of through friends and colleagues "I heard Essex got it bad but Kent is fine". Us. We'll just rerun this post from two years ago thanks.

...because every time I sit down at a keyboard my fingers default to WASD. And because some of my best memories and games have been on the PC, from the heady sprite driven days of DOS games; pointy-clickies like Discworld or the ancestral king of FPS's Doom.  SETSOUND= SB16  Through to the graphic driven monsters that plague benchmarking sites. My gaming memories start with the humble Commodore 64 in the 8-bit era and Amiga 1200 in the 16/32 bit era. Yes I flirted the consoles of that time, NES, Mastersystem, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive, but weirdly I remember playing Street Fighter II on the C64: But my first PC was an ex-office PC that ran windows 3.1 akin to the specs below: But as time went on I learned more about PCs I upgraded my 33MHz CPU, to 166MHz. My GFX card got a much needed boost, and as time went on upgrading just became a thing that had to happen, not necessarily just to play a game, but to keep a PC ahead-of-the-c...

Our part of the Internet is all a flutter about A not THE Steam Box (Piston or something) and now some biometric gaze tracking thing but I for one couldn't care less. Note, American friends it is couldn't care less not could care less. Could care less means that you still care about something. You could lower the level of care about something. Couldn't care less. Could Not. Anyway, I'll probably never be a PC gamer. Don't get me wrong I think PC games can be brilliant. Rock Paper Shotgun is my little window into the world of PC games and every now and then I'll get a little bit jealous of the gaming opportunities I'm missing out on. I love the stories that come from the RPS team and the unique gaming experiences that can only be had with mods, indie platformers almost as good as older platformers, the 'five second' games and loser generated stuff that really reaches into the upper echelons of what gaming is capable of being. On the other hand t...

As we mentioned in this post we've finally acquired all of the Operation Rainfall titles for the Nintendo Wii and we're proud of it. Thanks again to all the people who badgered Ninty to localise these titles. We've spent hundreds of hours on Xenoblade Chronicles , tens on the Last Story and fractions on Pandora's Tower . Nonetheless we're now in a position to bring you the most important information about these innovative titles that caused a mini renaissance in JRPGs. That was until nobody bought them. That question, which we bring to you now, uncut and unedited, free from the chains of 'the man' who keeps the video games press subdued and gagged. That question, which we're about to ask and then answer is: What are the tit physics like in the Operation Rainfall titles? We know. Finally right? Each of the games being a JRPG of sorts, Pandora's Tower is more of an action adventure if you insist on using nonsensical genre terms like that, f...

Okay, so we all take review scores with a pinch of salt M'kay? That said it interesting seeing how the world of games with it's bagillions of entries looks when you par each game down to a grade or number and compare them to each other, or platform to platform or year to year. MCV (who definitely did not have a bad year last year) reports on Metacritics analysis of last year and the results chime with how we felt about last year's games.  They were just a bit pants and this is the games that were making the headlines and everyone was talking about. For our personal tastes we hardly picked up any of these titles. Ass Creed still hasn't fixed the flaws that put us off the first and second one and Far Cry seems to be picking up GOTY nominations here there and everywhere by default. Like everyone else Dishonored was good but eerily instantly forgettable. Last year our gaming palettes were gorged with Xenoblade Chronicles (technically a 2011 release for EU), Poke...

New years Resolution are like video games, [insert witty analogy here. Perhaps watch that "The Thick of it" DVD box set your snooty guardian reading friend got you for Xmas for inspiration]. And as such we have some resolutions this year. Number one, do more posts. And dear reader(s) this is not just for you, you conceited twat(s), don't be so selfish. This is for us too. We need to spit some venom and bile about how games are not as good as they were X years ago, otherwise it builds up and the only way to vent is by punching random handicapped children on the street. Number two, We do solemnly vow to refuse to accept browser gaming, any review of such will only be ironic or sarcastic. We almost did a review in 2012 of Family guy online which is a browser-based- microtransaction-fueled-wow-clone, (remember when games were just defined as, Shoot-em-up, RPG, Beat-em-up, Platformer...) But thankfully we got our act together and did our usual; opened blogger and crie...