That guy's a Maniac...

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

If you are a game-o-phile and allergic to metaphorical feathers you will have no doubt got some snuffles last week as everyone and their dog (on our feedreader) got their tits in a twizzle about Jennifer Helper and comments taken out of context about some game called Mass Effect. An inoffensive summary is here . It is the kind of news that bloggers love to write about. It gives them a chance to play the White Knight, pass-off a comment about how horrible Xbox Live is and then fire off some unhelpful suggestions about how the gaming community at large should combat the par for the course racist, misogynist, etcist environment in games and on the internet at large (we should confront them for it and report them to Microsoft is a strategy that hasn't worked up until now).  So what is this all about then? Jennifer Helper who didn't write Mass Effect may or may not have said words to the effect that combat should be skippable in games. Cue- the "it is a vocal minority

We buy EDGE. We read EDGE. We are EDGE readers. Randy Smith writes for EDGE. We've previously wished that Randy Smith didn't write for EDGE. However, we may have to renege our wishes because he has written a nice article about Why Dead Rising Stands Out From The Hord e. As with all good game writing h e has perfectly enshrined my thoughts into words, thoughts I didn't realise I had until I read this. I love Dead Rising (including the Wii port). Randy sums up why. It's that feeling of me against the Horde. The way I play the game changes from moment to moment. I might be trying to save survivors, I might without really noticing it, decide to eradicate all the zombies from a particular area. I might just stroll about the casino/mall checking out the environment but always with one eye on the nearest group of goons. I know what I want to do and most of the times there's hundreds of zombies in between me and my own personal objective. Things go well I move on to the ne

Last week David Cameron was widely covered in the newspapers surrounding his ambition to create a Silicon City in East London. Although you might expect us to be excited about this it actually left us feeling a bit deflated and annoyed. Why, why is it time for a bulleted list? Yes yes it is. Reasons Why David Cameron and Silicon City annoyed TGAM. Video Games weren't mentioned at all in the coverage we read and we've just finished reading the excellent excellent Replay: the History of Video Games which is not just a damn fine book but it is so meticulously researched that we had revelation after revelation about how games came to be but also how games ended up being responsible for a great deal of the technological stuff that we now take for granted (including operating systems, twitter and facebook). To omit games seems a little bit short sighted when in fact we do have a good games industry in this country........ Especially with the increasing frustration over the scrapping

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

Read it here . Basically, former who-is-that-guy-again? leader of the tory party, IDS has pulled a Vaz. This time though, avoiding Vaz's idiotic mistake a few weeks back, he appears to be aware of all the laws about selling stuff to people who aren't old enough to buy it all. He just says nobody pays attention. He also comes out with: “We are driving children to lose their childhood, and some video games are incredibly violent, like Grand Theft Auto. They are meant to be 18 but nobody cares what it says on the label." Fuck off IDS. Just fuck off. When was the last time you took a bus after 11pm in this country? That's violence right there. Real actual violence. In fact for anyone living in London they probably see violence every week. I know I do. And then of course there are violent films on TV all day every day which anyone can watch with no restrictions whatsoever. Oh and books. When was the last time you got ID(S'ed?) for a book? And even then. Even if 1997 gam

Bored of video game lists? Loins not set ablaze by underground train stations? Then boy you are in the wrong place because here is TGAM's Top 5 Underground Train Stations* in games list. We may have done this list before that is how low on ideas we are. 5. Santa Destroy Tube Station . This is one of those ones we remembered so put it in here. You don't actually do much in it and all of the stairways and doorways are blocked off with wet floor signs or red cones. There are vending machines. You get the train to fight Destroy Man. 4. Raccoon City Tube Station . Somehow the zombie plague has caused some underground trains to crash. Maybe they ate the driver or something and he braked too hard in his death throws. Anyway, it is a scary place and looks exactly like Santa Destroy station. Is this how all American Tube stations look? My sample size of two says yes. Also, here's a fun fact in America they call the tube (or Underground) the sub-surfarizerotor. 3. Silen

As if you needed more reasons to not play your Wii, here are 2 massive ones: Ant and Dec Fig. 1. Ant and Dec are playing Mario Kart, as you can see they are also making racist Asian faces, furthering their racist stereotyping, they are likely playing badly. Fig. 2. Ant and Dec are amused that the DS has 2 screens. Fig. 3. Ant and Dec playing with the Wii balance board, I couldn't think of anything funny here... Just observe their massive shiny foreheads and perhaps pretend they are making "NEEEEOOOW" Aeroplane noises  For those of you who don't know (i.e. outside of the UK) Ant and Dec are a TV presenting duo lacking any sort of talent. They are huge corporate cash-ins who are involved in pretty much every reality show in some shape or form. There is very little spark of life left in their eyes, further likening them to a money driven automatons and I'm sure you can envision where you insert the cash. Cheating Cockba

A new video game created by celebrity scientist Baroness Susan Greenfield is set to finally harness the power of video games to make children do 'good things' rather than 'bad things'. Ever since 1996, children have been playing video games to kill zombies, pilot futuristic spacecraft and connect gems of the same colour in a line to make them disappear. "And what we've seen is that children go out into the real world and do these things" Greenfield explains. "Scientists reckon that video games are more powerful than influences from parents, peers and even television". "So rather than control them to manage a house of people as in the Sims or identify Pokemon footprints as in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time, we've harnessed that power so that children will do better in life by playing this game". The new game called The best you could probably do given your socio-economic background will launch ready for the Chris

Once you green light using negative stereotypes to convey message there is no going back. TGAM strikes back against this ridiculous facade. Spot the difference!

If you haven't heard or read it by now the Daily Mail has gone bonkers over the Launch Party for God of War II. Here it is . Using my skills obtained through my GCSE History I will now highlight how this article is mostly gibberish and how the Daily Mail needs to stop feeding Daily Mail readers with this shit and turning them into those women who get angry when they don't have the correct change for the bus and then they start shouting at the bus driver as if it's their fault when in fact it's probably a bit of mid-life crisis mixed in with Post Natal Depression. Well, if you will have children at 45........ It starts "Electronics giant Sony has sparked a major row over animal cruelty and the ethics of the computer industry by using a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game." Has it? Does this major row appear anywhere other than in the Daily Mail? No. Perhaps it would have been better if the goat was a freshly slaughtered, then frozen by bir

This post was going to be a "how-to write a generic games are bad article for newspapers". You know the kind of article that is blindly ignorant of Jenkins' 8 Myths about videogames. I say this post was going to because dirty love rat laughing stock Mario Party "politician" Boris Johnson already did it for us here . We read it in the more cost-less content EDGE this month. We were thinking of making him the That Guy's maniac of the month but then the Telegraph might pick it up and put it on the front page. The Telegraph is allegedly one of only two UK newspapers that employs a person to google the name of the paper every two hours. Any results are then cut and pasted into the letters section to make it look like they have readers. We do that too. All the anonymous comments are secretely us except "I love the way all the comments are between themselves". That's one of Amber's flunkies. Anyway, the thing: Here's a list of phrases and