That guy's a Maniac...

We love video game music here at TGAM and although there's been a rise in acceptance that listening to video game soundtracks or going to see concerts of the greatest hits isn't a weird thing to do, it's still an under appreciated part of video games. Nintendo have been knocking it out of the park recently with their sountracks, especially on collaborative projects. Pokken Tournament had a soundtrack far too good for it ( Haunted House ,  Neos City  and the phenomenal Magikarp Festival are favourites). Kirby games just keep remixing and reworking the seriously strong themes, Kirby's Epic Yarn 's Lava Landing is a particular highlight of recent titles. Fire Emblem's game is strong with the J-Pop earworms from Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE  through to Fire Emblem Warriors  ( This Precious World  stands out in particular blending Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem  Fates ' themes). The Splatoon series is deserving of a thesis or two on the storytelling thr

Yo! Following on from my  other post  about how there are far too many Neptune Series games in my life. Today we have:  Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls This one exists to dominate my mobile gaming gaming urges, on the Vita . Yup while everyone is playing with  their Switch's on their commutes. I'm happy to just sit down in a train full of passengers, pull it out and start playing with it... ...Anyways, yeah this one is a weird one and it took me a while a while to get my head around its premise... Right so you are aware that (more or less) the goddesses are anthropomorphised (albeit as Anime girls) representations of the console wars: Left to Right: Blanc (Nintendo), Neptune (Sega), Vert (Xbox), Noire (Sony) In superdimension they have also included a crossover with the "Sega Hard Girls" which, to make things more confusing, are representations of all Sega Hardware (geddit? Hardware/Hardgirls) Left to Right: Dreamcast, Saturn

Cock teases. So the gist of that expo was: There will be a PS4. It will have a controller. The Vita will be a hi-tech WiiU controller. There will be games. Very little on the hardware, except that it can render an old man with eyebrow twitches. The share button is for uploading game videos/screenshots.  What does the damned box that sits under your TV  look like?!? Will it be another kitchen utility a la the lean mean, fat reducing machine? Pfft. Love and Diablo 3 as well, Richie X 

Every now and then someone makes an extraordinary claim about an upcoming game that makes us turn our heads and get excited about gaming again. Then from hype to eventual release it turns out that said revolutionary feature was just a bunch of guff. Molyneux is king of the hype lies, David Cage frequently overstretches stating what his games can achieve. You know the kind of stuff we mean, the "your choices really matter stuff" that Mass Effect nearly got right or the "your actions will permanently change the world"  stuff that inevitably gets watered down by release time because it seems most gamers are babies who hate not being able to turn back the clock (or reload their save games) when things don't go their way. We've got our Patrats and our Watchogs on red alert particularly as we're nearing the beginning of the next generation and lying about future games tends to see a bit of a spike. Today's porky pie is courtesy of EDGE magazine's Q&

A great advert.

At various points over the weekend this image from that Neogaf thread had us inappropriately laughing whilst just going along, or on the bus, or at two o clock in the morning in bed. Oh god, uploading it got me going again.

Recently, we've been playing through Pikmin 2 (the wiimake) and boy it is still a great game and playing it makes us feel a little bit sad inside that a gamecube port can get us more excited than some of the latest releases. You've can't help but love the little guys and feel genuinely mortified when you see those little ghosts signalling you've just lost one. Speaking of new releases here are our reviews of all the games to come out this month: Bayonetta : Surprisingly good and out Devil-May-Crys Dante himself. Darksiders : Looks like a World of Warcraft character crossed with Devil May Cry and Prince of Persia on acid. Plays like Excalibur 2555 A.D. on poppers. Dark Void : Worse than Resident Evil 4, better than Spyborgs. Dark Ciders : Better than Strongbow, worse than Belgian beer. Dark Darkers 2 : Pretty dark considering. Darkstalkers : We wish. Mass Effect 2 : Will be as talked about and played as much as Mass Effect was for that week . MAG : As much fun as those t

This one is from the only other fellow  gaming celebrity   Leigh Alexander. "I prefaced this post with a reminder of the business realities major blog networks face because I find it hard to believe that Brian, who taught me quite a great deal about going the extra mile on news reporting -- because our audience deserves the whole truth -- would thumbs-up a porn star's "celebrity" advice column unless it were part of a larger and necessary Gawker initiative" Brian Kotaku Brian? The whole truth? Good one Leigh. Good one.

That means it's still not legal :( But yeah statutory rape jokes aside, fifteen years ago we were eyeing up that one big parcel under the tree crossing our fingers that it was a Playstation! Then on 25th being delighted and playing Demo1 over and over. Ah memories Tomb raider, Crash Bandicoot, Broken sword, Descent, Wipeout, and that weird thing where you could control a T-Rex... Yeah so 15 years, bet that makes you feel old! Merry playstaionmas, Richie XX

The first DSi only games were announced last week. I just don't understand why they would do that. Why so quickly? Why wait until half the world have a DS or DSlite, then bring out the DSi then bring out DSi only games. Wouldn't now be the time to be bringing out the DS games now that everyone can get in on the action? Realistically, it is probably something to do with the DS having an average attach rate of 3 games. Which means anyone wanting to accrue a collection or play through all the decent/semi decent DS games gets fucked with a stylus but the average punter gets to keep that shit-eating grin on their face. Everybody sing it with me! [In eastern European propaganda stylee] R4 cartridge! R4 cartridge! Giving the consumer a genuine chance at experiencing! This wonderful culture! They killed R4! They killed R4! Now the only option is to buy Kirby: Canvas Curse on Ebay! For a hundred bucks! R4 cartridge! R4 cartridge! Giving consumers the dream! The only way to play them a

'Free lads' have been arrested for mimicking drive-bys using a 'PlayStation Gun'. The beeb knows the score . "The gun was found to be a silver plastic PlayStation gun. " Shoddy reporting from the beeb. Was it a G-con? A G-con 2? G-con 3? Or was it a MadCatz pile of shit? Either way the boys should sue Sony because there is fuck all you can do with a PlayStation light gun these days so what other option do kids have after purchasing expensive peripherals that are in no way supported by new platforms. In unrelated news: Here is a list of light gun games for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 you cannot play on the PS3. Area 51 (Justifier) Crypt Killer (Justifier) Die Hard Trilogy (Justifier) Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas (Justifier/Guncon) Elemental Gearbolt (Justifier/GunCon) Extreme Ghostbusters: Ultimate Invasion (GunCon) Ghoul Panic (GunCon) Gunfighter: The Legend of Jesse James (GunCon) Judge Dredd (GunCon) Lethal Enforcers 1&2 (Justifier

Let's check. The last time we paid any attention to the "little handheld that could" there was nothing going on. From field data gathered by observing people using it on the bus and on the train it seems that 98% of them use it to watch Family Guy or South Park episodes. The other 2% play GTA. Apparently, it can connect to the PS3. Which is a shame because the PS3 is probably the least useful thing an appliance could ever connect to. In fact plugging your PSP into the ground probably offers up infinitly more exciting gaming opportunities. And what of those "games" that Sony used to do? Hmmmm Tekken is the best game for the PSP according to Gayspot. Looking at Metacritic there has only been one game post launch better than Lumines and Wipeout. Thems are four years old y'all. Well I do not know about you but I certainly can't wait for PSP Go! to play those four year old games on. Can you?

Via Kotaku via Official PlayStation Magazine: It's difficult to talk about Nintendo because we don't look at their console as being competitors. They're a different world and we operate in our world — that's kind of the way I look at things... And with the Xbox — again, I can't come up with one word to fit. You need a word that describes something that lacks longevity... Last time I checked, they've never had a console that's been on the market for more than four or five years and we've committed to a ten year life cycle, so you do the math... And unless things go really bad, there's no way that at the end of a life cycle our competition is going to have a higher install base. RAGE RAGE RAGE. How are you competing at all? We're all sick of this shit. No one believes you anymore. No one believes that you aren't royally fucked. Otherwise there would be some kind of new gaming news instead of endless stat tweaking reports about how the

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

Yeah it's like the desert! I'm sad at not being part of what we could now call 'this gen' and I think that all the players have had an ample chance to win my, an avid gamer's, attention. I have been singly just utterly unimpressed by the PS3 post launch (we all know about pre-launch). Gears of War and Dead Rising just don't justify spending that much ££££. Sorry guys you've had a while to get me onside but not convinced. Which means..... FTW. Why you say? Well it's affordable, it's not so geeky , it's fun (allegedly), I can play the entire Resident Evil back catalogue from 0-4 (that's six games people), both super smash brothers, it can talk to my DS, Crystal Chronicles, Pokemon, I know more people with a Wii than any other console (lot of non gamers too), I can play Pokemon Channel every day without finding all the relevant GC cables etc. I might get fit? Oh and virtual console has games that I might want to play (don't give me th

If you had asked me a week ago, "Do you want to get a PS3?". Despite Cunzy's AIDs analogy I would have said, "maybe" for only a few reasons: 1. The controller. I have no idea where people get off mocking the PS3 controller, as far as I can see, it is nothing but an improvement on the "best-controller-ever" for the PS2. This time it has no wires, and is motion sensitive. The lack of a rumble pack, killed me slightly inside, but apparently that has been sorted. Whatever company was suing them about it had lost. (You may have heard rumours that the rumble pack was not included due to the Motion sensor affecting it, this was "Sony Lies" , well not really, it does affect the motion sensor they are gonna include an on/off switch for the rumble feature letting the user decide whether or not they want this feature.) 2. It's the PS3. It seems that everyone has become quite jaded towards this word, despite all the worry and the excessive costs