That guy's a Maniac...

It's been a while since the last instalment of this series about all the gaming kipple we've collected over the years that fills cupboards and boxes away from the disapproving glances of partners. We started this series with some stuff that predates our video gaming 'lifestyle' choice and now we jump to the latest additions to the collection, which we frequently get out and lick, these ADOWABLE Pokémon near field communication (NFC) figures, designed to be used with the Wii-U game pad. Following on from the outlandish success of the Skylander's series Ninty are trying to cash in with this technology. Simply, you pop one of these figures on your Wii-U game pad and they pop up on the screen in the latest Pokémon Rumble game, one of the lesser Pokémon spin-off series. No doubt about it, it's a cash in (in previous Pokémon rumble games a similar feat was achieved through simple passwords alone) but we're huge fans of My Pokémon Ranch (153 hours 'playing

Over a month ago now, we trailed this series and then in classic TGAM style ditched it . This series is our way of getting some extra value out of all that stuff we've collected over the years, most of it travelling direct from the shop into the cupboard of shame. In surveying the collection we were in two minds about where to start. Should we mix it up and start at the end with the latest kipple we picked up in the HMV and GAME closing sales? Maybe start in the middle during 'our golden age of gaming' when we actually had the time/the inclination to play video games with every available second? Or perhaps we should go deep into the cupboard of Chinese manufactured goods and dredge out the things that started it all? Well we guessed you' expect us to choose one of those so in an elaborate twist we went waaay back. BEFORE the beginning. Perhaps this is where it all started with, sadly, all I have left of a once magnificent but also deeply shameful collection of Games W

There seems to be a lot of discussion at the moment about defining the language we use to describe gaming and more broadly defining the culture. One of the things we worry about here is how we preserve gaming. It's a medium we're still in the position to save most of but very little is being done to preserve it.  This recent Extra Credits video rather nicely sums up some of the major barriers to preserving the physical stuff of games. We aren't ardent institutionalists but we'd really like to see gaming museums seriously explore preserving and celebrating (museums are more than just historical archives). Museums have started to look at gaming and there have been a number of exhibitions on or incorporating gaming but to date there hasn't been an concentrated effort on displaying gaming for it's own sake. The Smithsonian exhibition The Art of Video Games and the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum were both good starts and both the Victoria Albert M