That guy's a Maniac...

For 15 or so years I have found myself fantasizing about whatever the next WoW patch or next WoW expansion will be. E ven now in the midst of this nostalgia fest that is WoW classic I am wondering, "what's next?" . We have reached a halfway point of sorts with WoW classic we are about to hit phase 4 of 6 in the WoW classic journey. Phase 5 and 6 are beefy phases of new raids AQ20/40 and Naxxramas, which may be quite lengthy, and after Phase 6 this is where vanilla stopped back-in-the-day.  But what comes after?  There is a general consensus that we will just get The Burning Crusade: Classic, the expansion that followed on from the original. I however, have another theory, hinted at from the announcement of the next expansion for current (retail) WoW: Shadowlands. It's unpopular but I have a wild theory... Since we haven't had an announcement and it's not confirmed perhaps there will not be a TBC-Classic. But instead what if there is some plan to brin...

In what was a rather typical week in gaming for some reason journos gave a lot of air time to that rape game, crap opinions about  Anthem evolved and game journos all had the same opinion about Nintendo Labo VR Kit. It continues to be disheartening to us that games journalism just isn't very good still. The broader games industry has a wealth of issues from understanding employment law to widespread amoral attitudes foster on the forums and in spite of this rather than because of it, it produces those games we love to lose ourselves in. Having a respected and professional industry of critics around it would also help a little bit to raise the perception and cultural standing of gaming instead, with rare exception, it's a race to the bottom for coverage of the hot topics and well, why read a hungry hack's regurgitated press release when you can watch your favourite streamer play the thing for four days straight instead. Considered critical opinion is very rare and many of ...

Like everyone else we were reaching for the pitchforks when Pokemon Shuffle was launched, a title published by Nintendo with explicitly freemium bullshit unlike the freemieish Steel Diver: Sub Wars which started life slightly less free to play and then got updated to be slightly more free to play and of course the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online which is a card game so for whatever reason the gaming press give it a pass or don't bother covering it. As lifelong Pokemon players I'd also like to throw in the "physically drag yourself to a GAME store to download a legendary Pokemon" for the Pokemon main series into the same category but only because those experiences have been so harrowing in the past it feels like a cost that transcends money. Our trajectory with this game went like this:   Please won't you buy some jewels to errr shuffle me? Please? Boo. Hiss. Ninty sellouts! It's... okay but I'd like to buy it. I doubt I'll stick with...

#GamerGate continues to tear the gaming community apart. Brothers and sisters fight. But there's a shining light. Writing letters to end the hate, harassment and nastiness that haunts our hobby. Theoretical game developers and community managers wrote their letter  and gamers have their petition  but as a community, video game journalists have not yet spoken out as a group. Until next week that is. An anonymous source who wants to remain anonymous sent us this letter which will be going out next week.  Dear Gamers (R.I.P) Please stop the hate. The only thing we have is the power of our opinion on games and gaming related things and if you don't like that then we don't get paid. Well a lot of us don't get properly paid in the first place. In fact being a games journalist sucks. We should really do something to improve our plight. Anyways. If games journalists stop writing are we not just gamers? Please stop the hate. Signed 7 of 9 Albert Brooks Andre...

Okay so everyone is going on about it but here's our exclusive lowdown on the PS2x2, that is two PlayStation 2s taped together. We've unboxed ours, here's the extensive feature list. Extensive Game Catalogue . What is it they say about buses? You wait a whole generation for a decent game (thanks PS3) and then hundreds come along. The PS2x2 can play some of the best games ever released straight out of the gate. Backwards compatibility . You can play all your favourite PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games and playing them couldn't be easier. Just put your old games in either of the disc slots and play away! With a PlayStation or PlayStation 2 memory card you can even continue your old games from where you left them. No rebuying games you already own. No waiting for downloads. Microsoft are going to have to really nail it to beat this. Forwards incompatibility . The PlayStation 2x2 is completely incompatible with PlayStation Move , any Resistance games or Heavy Rain ...

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...

We like to play games and we love to read about games. Sometimes it's hard to get the balance right so the reason why we've been quiet in past months is because it was all reading about games and snarking about games and very little actual playing games. We also like to read books about games. We've recently picked up Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders : How British Video Games Conquered the World and it'll be a nice addition to the growing library of good books about gaming and Resident Evil novelisations. As ever it says a lot about the coherency of gaming beyond the insides of consoles and boundaries of the Internet in that there isn't a massive section in the biggest bookshop by you called 'video games'. Invariably, books from This Gaming Life through to critically under-read Replay the History of Video Games might be under the Internet or indoor games or computing or web/graphics. I'm not going to get on my high horse and say that all gamers are i...

Chuff's our man on the mobile. He's been playing some games on mobiles and some thoughts have struck him thensly. Note, there's a super secret ending to this post only available to those who have played the game: Well shit, when did “Might And Magic” become “Might & Magic”? What a god damn shame, I guess that’s a pretty damning indictment of our life and times right there. I guess As, Ns and Ds and pretty fucking old school, we don’t want to alienate the Kids. A little pre-amble; My first experience of the Might And Magic series of games was on the original Playstation, it was an incredible Third Person, True 3D extravaganza called Crusaders of Might and Magic. Review: 10/10 WARNING IGN LINK  Wait! Three out of Ten? I guess my memories of the game are pretty muddy… Well, anyway, after smashing that game to bits I was hooked. Come the Playstation 2 era and the first game I played and completed was the awesome sequel, Warriors Of Might And Magic. ...

ZOMG how can the mega corporate beast that is EA with all its staff and testers and managers and everything all come together to produce an underwhelmingly underfinished game that can only be played online? Well dear reader you gotta break it down. and look at it from the stand point of a corporate machine: Point 1. The always online aspect was an immovable benchmark for EA and the Maxis games. The growing trend in the previous sim games was online connectability with growing focus on the origin community and microtransactions i.e. buying outfits and furniture in the Sims 3. To set a standard for "always online" games creates benefits that are at minimum two-fold: all future games will be online and monitored, thus less piracy and less association with the internet swearword "DRM", and secondly to generate a sim-community for milking cash-cow games with standardised sign-up accounts across all games. Point 2. The quality and technicality of the online experi...

So, Pokemon X and Y announced and we at thatguys have kleenex on standby. And this latest Valentines video shows us the newest evolution for Eevee! But no-one knows what type it is! In the Previous Generations it looks like this: Gen I Flareon: Fire Jolteon: Electric Vaporeon: Water Gen II Espeon: Psychic Umbreon: Dark Gen IV Leafeon: Grass Glaceon: Ice Which leaves Steel, Bug, Fighting, Poison, Ground, Flying, Rock, Ghost or Dragon. This Eevee evolution has been named Sylveon. Which rather annoyingly does not divulge the typing the prefix "Sylv" could refer to may things: Silver , indicating it is a steel type, however it does not look very steel-like. Sylvan, meaning foresty or arboreal, but we already have a grass type. Sylph,  which is a mythological air elemental, this could indicate a Flying or Ghost type, but nothing about it really screams either typing, except maybe a scarf that flaps in the wind. Or maybe a connection to Silph Co. the m...

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...

Fortunately, Alcamoth Citizen our journalist from Xenoblade Chronicles is in a place where the press can't touch her. She truly has freedom of speech. So Alcamoth Citizen, lay it on us. What's the haps? I think that that says it all. I hope we haven't implicated anyone directly or indirectly with this post....

Hey. We've been super busy playing all the new gems out. We bundled them up into this super review right here; 6/10 That's it really. Everything is good enough to function (barely) but there's nothing to set your balls on fire and send us with a G-con in one hand and a prima guide in the other to evangelise about our former hobby. Maybe we've hit the 'magical age', the ludopause, where we realise that actually games are all a little bit silly and most seemed to be aimed at angry American 11 year olds who think shootan' and blood and gore are cool and pretty much the be all and end all of all media. Well media that can be considered acceptable to lie about having played in the playground. 

MCV has the news y'all. I'm so excited about this. Here's the best of Gamestation: 200 Mint copies of FIFA 2001 A NES without any games, cables or controllers. Two G-Cons (not compatible with modern TVs). A copy of Halo 3 without the instruction booklet or sleeve. The Resident Evil trilogy. The films. The second third and fourth ones anyway. Well this'll get GAME back into the market.

It's hot outside which means vidjo games, in contrast to cricket, have to be cancelled due to fine weather. Everyone, literally everyone, else is going to parks and filling up beer gardens and the social pressure is for us to do that too. Plus, because we have to open the windows, we can't see our screens anymore. Lastly, because all our energy has melted away, the slightest excuse prevents us from playing most games. Can't play Sonic Mega Collection to unlock Comix Zone without finding the right memory card first? We'd probably die of dehydration trying to find it. Have to take the Wiimote our of it's condom to put it in the Wii-Zapper? Death unless you've got a parasol to protect you. Standing up to play Kinect? Make sure you take at least five litres of water. Luckily though, there's always Pokemon*. Nice safe, friendly Pokemon sitting in the DS, flick it open, turn it on. Gaming happiness from our melted pool on the floor vantage point. We can even secr...

So we love video game music. Not all of it, but when it is good we'll take it over millionaires crooning about getting their arse out or falling in love any day. It gets into our mind. So (bear with me) there's an advert on TV for the perfume Opium which has been on the idiot box quite a lot recently. I keep seeing it and it reminded me of a game. In particular this ad at 20 seconds.   Eventually, it came to me! It's from the Notre Dame theme from Timesplitters 2, composed of course by Graemem Norgate, one of the few men we'd happily marry without even meeting (we swooned when he wrote to us ). The relevant bit is in the vid DOWN HERE at 1:31:   And of course, both of these were 'inspired by' a certain Mr Mozart, this vid at 2:35.   Here's the handy URLs to skip the rest and straight to the bit I'm on about should you wish you music cretin Opium , Splitters , Mozart . That's it. Just saying. Jeez. End of the music lesson. Now. Fuck o...

Silent Hill, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil , Beyond Good and Evil, Zone of the Enders, Ico and SoTC and Halo Anniversary. All of these franchises have HD re-releases due out or out already. Although, we're hugely appreciative that older games are kept alive we're fans of being able to play the versions we already own. Important to note that aside from the original Halo it is impossible to play SH, DMC or RE on current generation platforms (okay so if you have an old PS3 or Wii you could still play some of these). But of course, HD re-releases are different from straight up re-releases but I can't shake the feeling that this kind of stuff is happening because the ideas are running out. Is this spate of HD re-releases a confession that this generation really wasn't much cop for innovation besides a graphical enhancement? Team TGAM is probably split on the issue but I'm of the opinion that technology has progressed faster than game designers and developers can keep up ...

Quote from Xbox CFO Dennis Durkin via EDGE Firstparty Xbox 360 releases "superior" to Nintendo or Sony's. "I would ask you to go and look at some of your data, just to compare first party performance over the course of this lifecycle, because I think our first party performance in terms of quality bars and units per title this shift has been superior to our competition's" If you click through you see he even goes on to claim sales per unit as well as quality to be reasons why Xbox 360 first party games are superior. Well "quality" may be harder to assess but lets look at sales shall we? Here's a selection from the Nintendo Wii (all data from ever reliable wikipedia): Wii Sports (76.76 million) Wii Sports Resort (27.68 million) Wii Play (27.38 million) Mario Kart Wii (27.00 million) Wii Fit (22.61 million) New Super Mario Bros. Wii (21.94 million) Wii Fit Plus (18.49 million) Super Smash Bros. Brawl (9.48 million) Super Mario Galaxy (8.84 mill...

We get literally a dozen emails every four years asking us how we manage to write at least two hard hitting posts a month. Well reader here's a behind the scenes look at a post in progress, with directors commentary at the bottom. That's right, we're opening up the creative process to you the readers. Not at all because we can't be bothered to write anything proper. Who knows? This may inspire you to start up yet another video game blog because there aren't enough of those around!!!!!* Here it goes: With my wife away on business, I've spent hours and hours with my mistress. There's nothing quite as thrilling as sitting in my pants, opening a bottle of wine and spending the night with another woman. However, this other woman isn't Tracy from accounts, it's a woman called Cunzy1 1 who is mighty handy with a bowgun. Yes, after months of waiting I finally picked up Monster Huntr Tri for the nintendo Wii and I've gorged myself on it this last week and...

Prostitutes. More specifically, killing prostitutes. Having sex with a prostitute and then killing her and getting your money back. This is but one thing you have been able to do in Grand Theft Auto games since GTA III. Sure, you could view a thousand beautiful sunsets, save lives as an ambo paramedic, drive a motor bike off of a fuck-off great mountain and parachute to earth or, if you were so inclined, elope with a white priest on a yacht to a secluded stretch sea for some serious inter-racial homosexual making out sessions*. There were thousands of things you could do in GTA which is one of the many many reasons why the games flew off the shelves. It's kinda what 'sandbox game' means. Sadly it seems none of those other possibilities piqued the interest of newscasters, alarmist journalists or lazy politicians quite so much as the prostitute scenario. To labour the point, you could, if so inclined, you could just drive real slow and careful, looking for blacks . But of ...