That guy's a Maniac...

NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES! Cunzy1 1 FINALLY joins the eighth generation of video game consoles! I'd been waiting for the XbOne, PS4 and Wii U to finally build up enough of a 'must-have' list of software to finally make the frankly-still-ridiculous cost of a new console worth it whilst working through the huge backlog of great older generation video games LEGO & Pokémon games. With the release of Pokkén Tournament , the time was right to finally pick up a Wii U and I've spent the variably weathered Easter in a darkened room catching up with three and a bit years of software. Initial impressions? Much like the Wii, interesting uses of the ''''whacky''' tech seems to have gone out of the window after earlier experiments like Nintendo Land and ZombiU . For example, Super Smash Brothers use of the second screen is virtually non existent and  Pokkén Tournament doesn't use it at all apart from in the borked couch-vs mode. At the o...

Living eating sleeping games. Sometimes it's hard to muster up the time and energy to actually play some games. As we are want to do we took a long hard look at our backloggery  and became determined to turn some of those medals from bronze to silver and from silver to gold. The games industry and the marketeers that surround it are all but obsessed with making you crave the new, the shiny but often new games fail to build on what's gone before. We've been hoovering up a lot of the content created by the games community which actually goes a long way to celebrate the history of games and gaming like the industry fails to do. Here we tip our hats to Two Best Friends Play . Puerile, sometimes but what TBFP does and does well is celebrate games. It's connoisseurship coming from the stands which is odd considering that most other media play a part in celebrating the culture they create.  Anyway, one of the marks on our backloggery profile, whilst hunting for the eas...

NOT A LOT GOING ON IN GAMING FOLKS. There's all that sexism rubbish which might be worth discussing were the internet version of the gaming community not a multiheaded siren screaming inanity. E3 failed to get anyone hyped about anything (those few people pretending that smartglass is a thing are clutching at straws). But don't worry kids! It isn't all:   AND   Umm. Well it might be. We hadn't thought past the joke. Quick look, a Final Fantasy VII rerelease... Phew that was close.

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...

EDGE magazine isn't just the thinking gamer's read, in our opinion it's one of the few 'publications' that transcends insulting and is actually written for people above the age of nine. By comparison, half of the shit on the web and virtually every other gaming mag falls somewhere between the Beano and the National Enquirer. However, one of the problems with a cross platform publication is that each issue can only offer a limited number of pages to each platform. Increasingly this has meant that every platform but the Wii gets coverage. In this month's issue E227 only one of the 23 games reviewed and previewed is a Wii game. Last month only two of the 24 games were Wii games. Now of course, it pleases more of the demographic,more efficiently to look at the cross-platform games !PS3, PC,Xbox 360) but the truth is that there ain't that much on the horizon . It seems that when Capcom or Nintendo aren't making Wii games, nobody is. Why is that Nintendo magi...

His profile is here. It's Brian Ashcraft. Fucking art history graduates churning out shit like the article linked in the blog title. For shame. For shame.

NOT BEN10 that hideous cartoon that isn't as good as all those cartoons we grew up on M.A.S.K etc. but a charming little Belgian film. When we're used to getting excited about, analyzing and dismissing media before it has even been released it was nice to be taken by surprise by this little film. I hadn't heard of it and in fact wasn't really aware of it being at all video game themed and a quick Google seems to suggest it wasn't picked up by the monolith of websites calling themselves video game blogs. It's a touching tale 'based on real life events' that quite heavily features video games but not in a brainless sense a la Gamer or a massive advert a la Wizard but featuring a video game ( ArchLord , missed that on the wikipedia page didn't ya, wiki cunts ) as part of a normal life. Dare-we-say-it even in a positive light? For gamers out there I'd recommend giving it a watch. Not only is it the best video game related film out there at the moment...

We already mentioned ALREADY JESUS CHRIST ALREADY GET OFF MY BACK MOM ALREADY! That we are big fans of video game soundtracks. Be it the official tunes, an inspired remix and very occasionally we even allow songs which have merely sampled an OT. to creep onto our MP3 player. PRO TIP : Never ever, ever be tempted to listen to a video game related song which has been filed under the 'comedy' or 'humorous' genres. They are almost exclusively 11 year old boys who sound like girls on helium doing the first season Pokemon theme tune. Tetris remixes aside, of which we are veritable connoisseurs, we do like hard copy soundtracks. They are often objects of beauty as well as magically trapping the music onto a disk. Here's our top 5. Yeah that's right bitches. Doing a list. Lists are normally the reserve for the green around-the-gills, unskilled new video game bloggers. But when you've been blogging as long as we have you are allowed to sometimes ironically do a list...

First can we say how sad it will be for all those who lose their jobs in the closure of 43 shops across the UK. Now that is out of the way can we now say good. Good riddance GAME. We tried to support you in the credit crunch crisis thingy but you didn't have the games we wanted a mere six days after launch . Also, I'm not entirely surprised at the closures either when your stores look and feel like a teenager's bedroom. We remember the days when GAME was merely an awesome mail order site and you'd order stuff from the back of a mag. We got Legacy of Kain, Resident Evil, Broken Helix and Tomb Raider from GAME before it became a shop*. Any and every title including the more obscure ones were available back then when gaming shops on the high street were basically for PC games and printers. To see it's horrid generic commercial horribleness now makes us sad :( *Just checked wikipedia. Our memories seem to be totally apocryphal. Maybe we meant Gameplay ? W/ever. OH MAN ...

Was the front page news the Metro was running today. Is it the first ever gaming news front page in a publication with semi-decent circulation? Probably. Anyway to the story as reported by the Metro. One gamer, cut off by MS had this to say: "I was gutted, completely gutted. It's like telling someone their dog's just died" Our thoughts on this. 1) Why is only people in newspapers say gutted. They are always gutted about things in newspapers but we all know nobody actually says gutted since the late 90s. 2)It is not like telling someone their dog just died because normally dogs last longer than a console generation, you can play with your dog any time regardless of whether you are connected/Xbox is working, you can entertain more than two people with a dog at any one time without having to set up Rock band, people know what a dog is, a dog is fully compatible with any dogs you may already have, girls are interested in dogs, you can take your dog outside or on holiday ...

I'm deadly serious. I can hear it all the time at work? I'm gonna leave it for two weeks and if I still have it then I'll start googling the symptoms, which I may have to paraphrase as I doubt "Constantly hears the sound from No More Heroes when you are near a Lovikov Ball" will get many hits.