That guy's a Maniac...

WIMMD: A little micro feature on the the buttons we press and joysticks we waggle! Recently I was rummaging around in my computer detritus box. A box which contains, SD card adapters, proprietary USB cables for devices I have long since lost, devices which have long lost proprietary usb cables, external dvd drives, scratched DVDs with ancient Linux distros etc etc and Controllers, I have collected quite a few, and I'd like to share a few of my favourites. With the advent of the WoW Classic release (ed: Dude that was half a year ago?!!) I decided to dust off an old PC controller from the late 2000s the Belkin Nostromo N52 . I initially briefly mentioned this over a decade ago when I had a sour rant about Steelseries' crappy WoW mouse . Now I know it looks like an abomination of a peripheral, akin to that of the weird human/alien hybrid in Alien Resurrection: Except rather than Ripley/Alien it was a genetic material threeway with a mouse, joypad and a keyboard. S...

We submitted this proposal to GDC. Fingers crossed we get picked! Session Title : What about the consumers?   In the Business and Marketing Track. Session description   Video games we are told are an ever growing market and medium. So why is it that product windows for making a profit are six weeks after launch? Why do game studios continuously close and rise from the flames under a different name? Why don't developers demand more of their publishers? Why don't publishers demand more from the retailers? Why are developer websites horribly out of date? Why does the industry seem to do its best to ensure that the legacy of gaming is destroyed as it is created? Why was Deus Ex Human Revolution at a 75% discount six weeks after launch? Attendee takeaway This session will give attendees a ground level view of how the average consumer will, if you are lucky stumble upon the game you invested years of your life, blood, sweat and tears into. This presentation...

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...

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...

First up read this , it's Richard Browne (pictured below) from umm, well he's an industry veteran okay. And he's finally willing to bring to the table that much missing piece of evidence to prove that pre-owned games are killing kids, raising house prices and toppling the game industry. At last. Some actual evidence to scrutinise rather than a dev sounding off because their last poorly marketed shite game that sat on the shelves for two weeks didn't sell as much as Wii Sports . That key piece of evidence? A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. [via Gamesindsutry international ] Ah, okay. That appears to be an anecdote and a suspiciously tall tale. Bro...

Quite! Screenie from the excellent Syberia.

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 played and wrote about (in yellow?) Lost Planet and pretty much hated it because it let us down. This was supposed to be next-gen. Then Richie tried to hide his excitement following the hype train for Lost Planet 2 and bemoaning the near-transparency of this IP amongst several 'hardcore' gamers. Well, like the adolescent boys we are we've had a little play for the first time [of Lost Planet 2] and we like it. WHAT WE LIKED 1) This is essentially an HD, fighting large things version of the truly truly excellent Freedom Fighters. Why didn't a single review (disclaimer: that we read ) draw this parallel? Freedom fighters was excellent. This game is also mostly excellent. Space dwelling snow pirates freedom fighters! 2) The Capcomness. Unlockables include emotes, nom de plumes, weapons and clothes. There are thousands of emotes and nom de guerres to collect and it''ll take even keen players forever to unlock them all. Once again, some of the unlocks are CAPCOM ...

Dear all. We have only just finished Metroid Prime 3: Corruption but before snarky web morons laugh out loud and then point out that it took us three years to complete a game, we would like to qualify that it took us 22 hours actually. We had other stuff to do between 2007 and now. The Other Stuff We Did Didn't spend all our time on Internet forums complaining about how we might have to dust off our Wii because we play every single game that comes out to completion in about two days because we are school-aged losers who have no other life to speak of. Competitive sports. The manly ones. Talking about cars. We like the ones with alloys on the pistons. Trying to get platinum medals for everything on Timesplitters Future Perfect even though officially we pretend the series stopped at 2. Emailing Penny Arcade monthly or so with various ruses. They are either so cunning they see through our excellent ruses or they don't read 90% of the shit most people send them. Lying to our younge...

Koopa Trooper beams are gonna blind me. But I won't feel blue. Like I always do. 'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you. I was sick and tired of everything when I called you last night from Glasgow. All I do is eat and sleep and sing. Wishing every show was the last show. (Wishing every show was the last show). So imagine I was glad to hear you're coming. (Glad to hear you're coming). Suddenly I feel all right (and suddenly it's gonna be)and it's gonna be so different. When I'm on the stage tonight. Tonight the Koopa Trooper lights are gonna find me. Shining like the sun. (Koop-p-pa Troop-p-per)Smiling, having fun (Koop-p-pa Troop-p-per). Feeling like a number one Tonight the Koopa Trooper beams are gonna blind me but I won't feel blue (Koop-p-pa Troop-p-per). Like I always do (Koop-p-pa Troop-p-per). 'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you. Tonight the Koopa Trooper lights are gonna find me. Shining like the sun. (Koop-p-pa...

Aw isn't that cute... They made it look like a real console, adorable. Yeah it's some bundle with Monster Hunter Tri (3) so dont expect the EU to get it, ever. Luv and shiny wired controllers, Richie XXX