That guy's a Maniac...

Alright troops! ohmygotlookapostaboutagamethatisnota3DStitle. Its back, FFXIII in its final (ha) form. Dropping the party based shenanigans, the game is all about controlling just Lightning, who is getting down, dirty and quite sexy with the badguys/monsters/Chocobos at the end of time. So this is the third installment of the FFXIII "Trilogy"... And well in my opinion a welcome addition the FFXIII mechanics have been refined, reinvented and remain familiar yet different. It strikes a wonderful balance and achieves something very few games sequels can do: it doesn't feel like you are starting off from scratch again, especially since you have over leveled your teams from the previous games. Lightning returns is odd, it a beautiful game and in this iteration you have a million costume options and all of them can be customized. I swear I have spent more of my time in-game pissing about in menus than running about in the over-world! The story has the usual

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

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

We were lucky enough to reach the grand old age of 30 again last week and among the presents presented us for surviving the 90s was a copy of Trivial Pursuit: Master Edition. Now, if you're like us then Trivial Pursuit progresses by quickly hoovering up the green, yellow, blue, pink and brown (now purple, presumably to avoid endless entertaining 'pink or brown' choices) wedges/cheeses/pizzas and then spending the rest of the game passing back and forth over the orange Pizzedge spot waiting for the odd chess question in between endless fucking cricket and soccerball questions. Well. NO LONGER! The recent master edition now has a bunch of video game based questions meaning that a) It doesn't take quite so long to get that orange chedge slice b) Finally, all that video game knowledge is justified in the eyes of your immediate family as you beat Uncle "Knows it All" to the win all because of a Halo question. Somewhat paradoxically it takes inclusion in

With, it seems, the whole games industry writing off the Wii in preparation for the Wii-U, now is a great time to snap up some of the quirkier releases on the platform which are currently selling for ridiculously cheap prices. Recently we've picked up Cursed Mountain, Deadly Creatures, Metroid: Other M, Disaster Day of Crisis and Madworld for less than £16 (for all of them). Individually they are a bit quirky but they represent a time and a platform with more interesting ideas than current HD console gaming which seems stuck in a bit of a rut with a a severe case of sequelitis. Trauma Center: Second Opinion is one we snapped up for a fiver a while ago and we've only just got around to playing it. We played Trauma Center/re: Under The Knife, the one and only popular medical 'em up on the DS. It was fun, if not a bit tough and also challenging. The Wii version, Trauma Center/re: Second Opinion is pretty much exactly the same game albeit with a name change and with the a

As I mentioned earlier , I played through FF7 with some nice mods, to increase the quality of the graphics and such. There were some other mods to break the 9999 limit on everything, allowing you to deal over 9999 damage, and your HP could be over 9999 too. however enemies could also hit you for over 9999. and the most fun one was "Aeris Resurrection" the guys over at Qhimm.com created a little patch to keep her in your group and to allow you to keep using her and the time you invested in her, they even added dialogue for her during the rest of the game and a hand new upgrade to her "ultimate weapon" replacing the Aeris ghost scene when revisiting the church later in the game. Done really well! I thoroughly enjoyed replaying it, remembering 99% of the secrets and locations. I even bested Emerald and Ruby Weapon, though cheaty... I used Aeris level 4 limit break which renders you invincible for the duration of a battle, but still, I wasnt really in that game for t

Mad Catz are getting more and more credibility these days, i remember the days when 4 people sat round a console and "player 4" got stuck with the cheapy 3rd party controller that everyone dreaded. That controller used to be made by Mad Catz. Now they have released these controllers specifically for the gaming elite, for the "pro-gamers" allowing for things like interchangeable team plates. But most excitingly interchangeable D-Pad/Thumbsticks, making the 360 more like the PS3 controller, and vice versa. I'm still pining for this, 5 years on from getting the 360 I still prefer the DualShock PlayStation layout. However what bothers me about this incarnation and the thought and process put into it is that the 360 D-Pad seems the same. I really really fucking despise the 360 D-Pad, and have done from the start, firstly it's in the wrong place, though this is fixable on this gaypad, but it frequently just does not function well. It suffers from I-pressed-Up-no

Well following on from my last post raving on about how great the emulator version of Ocarina of time is Graphically and entirely. I decided to dig out all the old N64 games I had and, straight up, create a collection of all my old N64 games and have them running in some oddly-polygony HD glory. Sadly none of them work. My top 5 of my favourite games for the N64 that dont work on an Emulator. (click the images for full rez versions) Mario 64. Mario actually ran quite well despite some visible games between walls, but I'm sure they were there in the fist place. However, there were many areas where things were just not visible first example being the first bonus slide: Closer you got to the slide the more it would disappear, so annoying. 4. Shadows of the Empire. This one I was really looking forward to, I remember this game quite fondly, one of the most under-rated launch titles. However, once you get past this screen, the menus are a garbled mess: 3. Super Smash Bros. Th

Lightning: We have to stop the Zaffels. A Man Who is Whack: Are you sure? Lightning: .... Whack Man: But I thought you were Pincelplips Lightning: I guess we were all along Whack Man: Quick. Get to Hope. Four inches down a corridor later. Hope: Where is lightning? I always hated it since the Pandforma days. Whack Man: I'd like to submit an edict regarding the use of nouns for names. Lightning: Hope! Did you ride the Vangle Goolies lightning? Hope: Hopefully not Lightning. Lightning: I meant lightning not Lightning. lightning: Zzzzzap. A CHOCOBO CALLED CHOCOBO COMES FROM WHACK MAN'S HAIR Hope: Let's get a slave. Apparently, after twenty hours of this, the game gets 'good'. *Perhaps Square should have waited for the science to have been double checked on this one.

The last Ubisoft game we bought was Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs. Until this DRM thing came up I didn't even know people played games on their PC. PCs are for making graphs and writing reports on. Jeez already. AMENDMENT 1: So is like Rayman on PC then? AMENDMENT 2: What happened to Rayman?

This is yet another first in a 'probably not going to get past two series of posts' series here at TGAM. It seems that a lot of people stumble upon TGAM by typing filthy questions into search engines. They then stay for an average of 00:00 to 00:01 seconds before going elsewhere, questions unanswered. It seems that nobody has heard of GAMEfaqs, fucking idiots. Well we're here to help you. An agony aunt for the depraved youth of today who don't know how to do searches properly. So this will be a weekly surgery to answer those burning questions that many of you think we can't answer here at TGAM: 1)Every week about a thousand people look for Sheva Nude, Sheva's panties, nude, nude code, nude mods, naked, nude patch, naked cheat, Sheva's ass and combinations of all of the above. The full cheat is here but you're better off just creaming off a hot one over at deviant art. 2) List of dinosaur games. You can cobble together most of them by visitin

Nobody likes DLC. Nobody at all. Oh what's that? You couldn't get your act together long enough to finish that level before release so we can buy that shit later? Great . Thanks. However, the end of DLC is in sight. We got a quote from Alistair Darling, UK Chancellor of Treasures: "Nobody got any money. This means EA and everyone else has to fuck the fuck off about DLC." He then went on to say: "Media pissing molecule keep going on about how they made Little Big Planet with five people in six hours. Now they expect me to shell out 14 euros for the privelage [sic.] of a fucking Mario sackboy and I have to build my own levels to play on..... You wouldn't go to MacDonalds and be satisfied when you order a hamburger to get a roll, a 'patty' and a gherkin laid out on a tray and then be expected to build your own burger and pay for that sodding sauce. This gets right on my tits" Hurrah Mr. Darling. Hurrah we say. We'll vote for you at the

Wanted: 'Ideas' person for EDGE magazine. Job Description: To think of game-related shit for writers to fill three to fourty pages with. Menu Screens. Menu screens. The latest issue of EDGE includes an article about menu screens. You know, the bit in games before the main game. Not only is the appreciation of menu screens long overdue but it is plagiarised from us, with our prestiguous best menu screen award of DEC 2007 and our love of alternative menu screens hinted at here in August 2006 . Furthermore, it's boring. It's okay for the losers of the world's 715,214 most popular-as ranked by Technorati- blog to write about it. However, unlike TGAM I don't have to waste my life and £4.50 to access it. Just my life and a bit more of my life to write it. In order to help EDGE magazine staff out so that I, and maybe you, don't waste further pennies and minutes here are some more ideas (some of which may have already been used, I didn't check) to fill the mag

Ugh, so I was playing Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (Terrorist Hunt) the other day as I was playing it I was finding myself more and more frustrated about the positioning of the analogue sticks on the 360 controller. To the point where I decided to have a look into third party controllers that have the analogue sticks in the "correct" positions. But to no avail. It seems as though the entire gaming community has become enamoured with the layout of the 360 joypad. I found myself (dual)shocked by this, the Playstation controller is staple in my mind, I'm pretty sure when I die and rigor mortis sets in my hands will clamp up on my chest in the exact position to hold a Dualshock 2. Yeah, so I was (dual)shocked that there were no Madcatz, or whatever third party controllers, that had decided rip off the Dualshock design and create a controller for the 360. I even went as far as to check if there were some crazy mod sites out there that maybe did it, then I find that thay have actual