That guy's a Maniac...

"It's back Barry. It's ruddy back" Said Ron. Yes it's time for the 2019 Barry Burton Rank Off #BBRO where we rank Barry Burtons on a scale from Barried Up To The Hilt to I'll Be The Coat, You Be The Hook Barry . Can't find your favourite Barry on the list? It's a gross oversight from us. We should get fired. 8 . Barry is that you Barry? As seen in : Resident Evil Franchise. Description : Not all Barry are born equal. We'd rather this Barry just held us and stroked our hair. 7 .  Flesh Barry As seen in : Resident Evil Franchise. Description : The Barry that got our gussets gooey all the way back in 1996. That he's this far down in the list goes to show how Barry some of the Barrys are out there! His blood type is O. M. G. 6 .  Gai Den Barry? As seen in : Resident Evil Franchise. Description : This Barry is blocky. This Barry is bulky. We've got some ideas about that hunk o junk. We'll give you a clue- BURY IT BARRY. BU...

Wow another cycle of the globe: Another 12 months of lax posting and unenthusiastic wordsmithery. What happened to you guys? Well we could blame it on getting older not having the time to play games (RE every other blogger out there). We could blame it on the spark of venom and fire that once fuelled our passionate ramblings being quenched by our latter years "contentment". We could also blame it on our lack of motivation to keep spouting in a saturated genre, how can we even compete with the plethora of video game blogs, increasing their production values, not to mention the gaggle of youtubers (*collective noun required) vaping and shouting down their mics as they play the next generic shooter. Well whatever it may be, TGAM ain't dying any time soon. TGAM started way back in the heady mid 00's, we have been around longer than some bloggers!  and this dead horse has plenty of years of beatings left in it. So what have we got lined up for you? More "r...

This weekend, it'll be Adios Alola and Alola to, errrr, Alola as we leave Pokémon Sun and Moon to start the adventure once again in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon. We initially reviewed Sun & Moon back in December 2016  so in this cutting edge piece of investigative journalism we interview the writing team behind award winning gaming blog That Guy's a Maniac to see what impression the game will leave a year later and some hopes for the new games out this week. How many hours did you clock?  Cunzy1 1 : So I ended up clocking nearly 330 hours on Moon, it's only Sapphire on the GBA and Y that I think I've played for longer. Richie: A meager 250 hours on Sun, my lowest clock up of hours for any Pokémon game (X was over 1k hours!) What did you like about Sun & Moon? CZY: I thought there was a lot to like about Sun & Moon and part of that tried and tested iterative design from the Pokémon Company brought and bettered a lot of good ideas f...

NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES! Cunzy1 1 FINALLY joins the eighth generation of video game consoles! I'd been waiting for the XbOne, PS4 and Wii U to finally build up enough of a 'must-have' list of software to finally make the frankly-still-ridiculous cost of a new console worth it whilst working through the huge backlog of great older generation video games LEGO & Pokémon games. With the release of Pokkén Tournament , the time was right to finally pick up a Wii U and I've spent the variably weathered Easter in a darkened room catching up with three and a bit years of software. Initial impressions? Much like the Wii, interesting uses of the ''''whacky''' tech seems to have gone out of the window after earlier experiments like Nintendo Land and ZombiU . For example, Super Smash Brothers use of the second screen is virtually non existent and  Pokkén Tournament doesn't use it at all apart from in the borked couch-vs mode. At the o...

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer for Nintendo 3DS The red squirrel is dying. Nothing can be done. It's cancer. Cancer. A woman loves a horse. But only because he lives in a castle. Not because of the size of his cock. A hippo studies cephalopods in space. He's close to a breakthrough. Sometimes an otter watches me when I sleep in other people's beds. He never says anything At the school, the animals watch each other go the toilet. They don't find it very interesting. Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer . GAME OF THE YEAR 2015.

Recently I was gifted a PlayStation 3 and a fairly comprehensive catalogue of games which is great for two reasons. Firstly, free games! Secondly by being gifted one it allows me to maintain that the PlayStation 3 never reached a critical mass of games for my tastes that warranted a purchase of the (still) overpriced console. One of the games that was on the shortlist that never reached critical mass was Valkyria Chronicles.  Released in 2008 to generally positive reviews, Valkyria Chronicles is a mix of all the best bits from Advance Wars , Battalion Wars and quirky PlayStation 2 game Ring of Red . It's a 3D turn based strategy game which is a lot of fun with a beautiful art style. Playing games slightly time shifted from the climate in which they were released is interesting. Although I can see the appeal of VC when it came out, having played and loved Fire Emblem: Awakening last year, VC is probably lower in my estimations as there are some great mechanics which shou...

Hey sports fans. Long time no see. The reason why I've been absent from these pages leaving Richie to hold the fort since January is because I got burnt out by video games. This probably happens to most gamers every now and then but since January this year, I've just become so frustrated with games and the games industry I pretty much cut them out of my life for a while.  I haven't stopped playing them. At the moment the magical trilogy of Resident Evil Revelations, Pokemon Y and Fire Emblem: Awakening in my 3DS keep me ticking along but my perception of what the video game journalists and industry would consider, I'm not really playing games. Those games are old. Nobody is talking about them still. Why play those? Why not shell out a still-ridiculous amount of money for a new console that it appears nobody wants and nobody seems to know what to with.  I get a bit obsessive about things and most frequently, video games is one of those things I obsess about. I...

Pokémon X and Y have been out for a while now and we're only just writing a review? Well we are well aware that nobody reads this, it's just we felt that the reviews that came out when the game did were just a bit lazy. We can understand why, it must be horrible for an RPG to land on your desk, especially if you're not a fan of a series like Pokémon. Plus, is there any point in a review of such a mega franchise? Unless the series curators massively messed around with the recipe, it's going to sell like hot cakes anyway. Might as well phone that review in (and many did). Job done. So we're writing this for ourselves more than anything. When the aliens are poring over the remnants of our burned out civilisation maybe a media studies student might pull this review of the charred remains of a Google server somewhere. So we're writing this for us and the alien. Evolution not revolution is the phrase that hacks might turn to when reviewing a new Pokémon game....

Sick of hearing about the Xboxone and the PS4 through constant RUMOUR and drip, drip of unconfirmed screenshots of a next gen game taken with a shaky cam from a brown paper bag? Bored of the Official PlayStation magazine tweeting about the number of USB ports on the PS4? Tired of the never ending whine of fanboys who miss the good old days when you had to get cheat codes from the back of a mag and you could only play the latest games at your mates house on all those illegally ripped disks?  You want to hear the facts? You've come to the right place, because we my friends have a source. ON THE INSIDE. It's Alcamoth citizen from inside Xenoblade Chronicles . Here's what she has to say about next gen.  You heard it here first. EXCLUSIVE.

One thing we would like to add to this post : Is that while getting my ass handed to me by all those legendaries, I was able to experience the other side of the pokemon games. Namely what it felt like to be an NPC. All these over powered super speedy pokemon, and here was me with a fucking stunfisk. I felt the pain of those stupid fucking team rocket grunts, making their grandiose claims of world domination with a fucking level 9 Zubat. These comics know what I mean: VGCats Super Effective 63 VGCats Super Effective 64 Dorkly, the fate of all NPC Trainers Fuck 'em, now those NPC's will feel my wrath with a furious vengeance! Love and almost a Pulp Fiction quote, Richie X

Alien Resurrection for the PlayStation is fucking brilliant. The recent car crash that has been colonial marines has led many so called games journalists spout that there have never been any brilliant Alien games. Of course, because they were probably foetuses when many of them originally came out (and gamers who play older games are some sort of messed up because as a medium it's constantly improving unlike any other medium that has ever existed so any game released this week is obviously and by default better than last week's RANT CONTINUES HERE ). Alien Resurrection was one of the good ones. At the time, EDGE gave it a 9 and compared it to a GCSE in terms of how rock solid it was. I would link to that review except the EDGE website is awful and they haven't realised how uploading all their really good older content might get them some hits. However, it is rock solid and a bit scary even today . I've been stuck on the same section for over a decade. Every year...

We're a bit Pokémon upped a bit recently. It's our go to game and if we're playing it, it probably means there isn't much else out there at the moment and AMEN AIN'T THAT THE GODDAM TRUTH.      Two days a man called GARRETT gave me the greatest gift a person can give to another. He gave me a level 44 Tornadus. Fine, you might say. That's done on street corners the world over. Well. You'd be wrong fucker because this Tornadus was the 649th Pokémon for my pokedex. This is huge news. I finally 100% legit CAUGHT THEM ALL. They said it couldn't be done . But it is. What's that, you calling me an Internet liar? I ain't one of them Reddit sun bitches go tellin' lies of this magnitude just to sound cool. Here's the proof that couldn't have been replicated of falsified in any other way because them photos are in COLOUR.   It's been a trial and for the longest time it was darn near impossible to catch them all because those h...

This image has very little to do with the film. Richie and I were supposed to be saving watching this for a girl's night in but now we live within 600 miles of each other we don't see each other half as much as we used to. So I caved and watched it and unfortunately I roped my better half into watching it. She'd sat through the first Silent Hill film and it had such an impact on her that halfway through the film she confessed that she thought Silent Hill was Hellraiser . In a way I was wishing it was too. This film is bad in a generic and inoffensive way delivering a double dose of cringe. One cringe for it just been a not very good film. Another cringe for it being yet another not very good movie adaptation of a video game. I've not checked the rankings recently but surely in the order of genres of film, video games adaptation must be down near the bottom of the list just below 'American TV dramas about big city people falling in love with a rural '...

Last weekend, once again we went through the humiliating ritual of busting down to the nearest GAME with our DSi and copies of Pokémon White and Pokémon Black Version 2 to download Legendary 'mon Meloetta. That takes us up to a sweet 648/649 (Deoxys aaargh) in our eternal mission to Catch 'em all , this generation of Pokémon is the closest we've come. In all our years of playing these ridiculous games, Nintendo seem to have finally realised that yes, Europe is a viable region and that some people do play their multi million selling game series. For previous generations we'd get shafted over special events and event only Pokémon meaning that unless you turned to an Action Replay you were destined to have to live with empty spaces dotting the pokedex. That's not to say that all regions are treated equally. Oh no. With Pokémon Black and White Version 2 there's now a multitude of ways to receive special gift pokémon and items from Mother Ninty. gifts ...

We've mentioned before how we're slaves to progressing our Backloggery  scanning the glut of games that we own but haven't beaten, let alone mastered. But we can't be alone in looking at 'the collection' and thinking "there's nothing to play". New games keep coming along and tempting us with their sexy new concepts, big graphics and face shooting shenanigans. But we've still got thousands of hours of untapped gameplay that won't cost us a penny.  However, some of those games we'll probably never finish. take Okami for example. Released over 15,000 times, Okami is a beautiful game. Virtually every screen (outside of the menus) could, nay should be printed and adorned on all the surfaces of abodes. But there's a problem. It's too big! Back in the day, when we had hundreds of hours to dedicate to games, this wouldn't have been a problem but these days it is literally too big to play. Here's how my last couple ...

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 ...

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...

Sharla who? Yes in the second of the Operation Rainfall titles we've been playing through we think that our crush on elastatits has been completely replaced by our love of the heavy-drinking, fun loving, foul-mouthed Syrenne of The Last Story . Plus she's disabled*! A strong, disabled female video game character who puts the typical JRPG male protagonist to shame.   *She has a Northern accent.

So here it is then, the future: long gone are the days of plugging your console into your TV, long gone are coaxial cables, even scrabbling to put the SCART in, whilst trying to trace the input with your finger to make sure it's the right way up, is slowly becoming something you will wistfully retell to your grandkids. Nowadays everyone has a digital device and can "game" on anything. We have finally come to a point where these devices have higher quality games, no less than a few years ago colour mobile devices were playing glorified Commodore64 games using your 2,4,6,8 keys as a joystick.  Now we have easily PS1/PS2 quality games on the bog standard SMART phones, in no time at all its going to be the same tech everywhere expanding/improving at the same rates. As someone who has lived through the advent of home gaming, through generations of consoles, I can consider this a kind of golden age of gaming... Its everywhere! Yeah its fucking everywhere and sponsored by...

Who wants a review of a nine year old game? Who DOESN'T want a review of a nine year old game more like? Yes Wii U is almost upon us and all those retarded journos, the morons who run GAME and those ridiculous early adopters won't stop bloody going on about it. However, much like the 3DS it feels like a series of reruns. There's genuinely nothing original on the platform bar Nintendoland but I can tell you now that 90% of Wii U games won't pick up on the brilliant idea of hiding information on the game pad or asymmetric gameplay.  It'll be like motion controls all over again. Everyone and their dog will make platformers where poor old player 5 (the mum character in the current TV spots) jabs the screen to create platforms and generally has far less fun than a quick spot of rub the man in the boat.   But fuck new games. I'm still catching up with the Gamecube releases. I distrust those pricks online who claim to be 'bored' by a console (normally...