That guy's a Maniac...

Dear Snowflakes, What is your fucking problem, pie and mash not good enough for you, why don’t you go and have a word with yourself before I anti-vax your Pain au Chocolat! Yeah that’s right jog on before you do yourself a culturally appropriated mischief, innit. You think the fucking King of all Cosmos is watching the latest fucking lecture from Dr Who on woke culture? Nah m8, he’s putting his boys out on the front line, gettin ‘em learning the family trade and any of you muggy cunts out there sipping on gender fluid organic cruelty free soy lattes, who are not doing the same should be ordered to ring the parents of a soldier who has died serving their country in Afghanistan and tell them their reasons. Brexit means Brexit! Imperial measurements, blue passports, mothers pride bread and tesco value beans, top of the pops and rehashes of games from 2004. Fuck the 350 million to the NHS, I’ll give £16.99 of my hard earned for that privilege! Just the price of a pint of milk in...

Hi guys, Another year has gone by, and we out-did our productivity from the previous year by one whole post! Which I'm sure on a chart somewhere we could spin into some kind of TGAM Renaissance . This year we are turning 13 which is, I'm sure, a milestone for many bloggers. Is blogging still a thing? We have seen so many die... Last year we made some bold statements, did we follow through on them? More "reviews", this year we are going to enter the world of steam curators. Expect more obscure and awkward scoring systems. Um well we actually did do some reviews, and at least one of them was current. and we genuinely became a steam curator, Steam expect more questionable creepy anime games to pop up on that one! Sex sells, as does Cephalopods. Due to our dulling imaginations we will do sequels to our most "successful" posts (Boobs, Nude Cheats, and Omastar, see below). Kinna, we did reference our old stuff on DMC4 , but it was sad to watch....

We like to play games and we love to read about games. Sometimes it's hard to get the balance right so the reason why we've been quiet in past months is because it was all reading about games and snarking about games and very little actual playing games. We also like to read books about games. We've recently picked up Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders : How British Video Games Conquered the World and it'll be a nice addition to the growing library of good books about gaming and Resident Evil novelisations. As ever it says a lot about the coherency of gaming beyond the insides of consoles and boundaries of the Internet in that there isn't a massive section in the biggest bookshop by you called 'video games'. Invariably, books from This Gaming Life through to critically under-read Replay the History of Video Games might be under the Internet or indoor games or computing or web/graphics. I'm not going to get on my high horse and say that all gamers are i...

I still feel sad after I heard news of this: The Loading bar . We have, for years, contemplated the possibility of our own little gaming themed pub, though admittedly it was supposed to roll off the success of thatguys.co.uk. Which, if we were to take our market research from, we would have Sheeva Nude, and Gay Dante themed bar. However where does this stop? Gaming culture has come leaps and bounds since our blog started a little over six years ago (SIX!) there is a definite acceptance and hip-mainstreamism (akin to geek-chic) of gaming. It has taken much longer than I expected for a theme bar to be created, at least in the UK. The Mana-Bar in Australia aka Yahtzee Croshaw's bar has been open for ages now. But why only bars, we have nightclubs for music, cinemas for Movies, we used to have arcades for games (Ha!). We occasionally have E3 and other over hyped corporate events. But these are yearly, and as much fun as it is to get confirmation that Game X has been conf...

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...

Occasionally we stub out our crack pipe (hard but do-able), log off the forums and give up our angry Internet man jig to don a smocking jacket , pour ourselves a Malibu and read a book like in the olden times. This weekend we donned three smoking jackets, poured ourselves three Malibus and finished reading three books. Our English teacher will be so happy with us.  First up is Jacked The Unauthorised Behind-The-Scenes Story of Grand Theft Auto which makes us feel ignorant about the history of video games in the same way that Replay A History of Video Games highlights how ignorant many games 'journalists' are . Yeah we loved Lemmings and knew that DMA made GTA but we didn't know that they were Scottish. Shame on us. The book is a good read. The first thing it made us do is want to play GTA again. Five hours later we picked the book up again and cringed over how gushy Kushner can be sometimes. But I guess that's the deal when you are writing an unofficial biograp...

Remember the GMAs? You know the Games Media Awards? Well it is a UK awards thing for people who write about games. one of last year's nominees was Chris Scullion who writes for the Official Nintendo magazine in the category SPECIALIST WRITER PRINT. Sadly he didn't win and presumably he was having an off day in OPM 79 when he writes the following about Dragon Quest X: Also making the decision tricky [about whether to get the Wii or Wii U version] is the fact that, as it's the first RPG [on the Wii] to focus more on online adventuring (much like Monster Hunter Tri)... Is it the first or is it not? Snark snark snark.

We did a puzzle Back when we were excited about MvC3 we did an homage to Poison You know that regular piece we do? You know Unit of the Month? No? Crazy We realised Something We had too much free time We did a lengthy piece on "Digital Convergence" We predicted it  Black and White came out We decided we weren't  having fun We did an  Interview We lost something We invented the quadruple/triple inverted commas We joined the 3D fad Well that is it for this year, we'll be back in 2012 for the Mayan apocalypse, a million HD remakes and announcements of the next consoles? Abba said it best... Love and Next year we promise it'll be better, TGAM X

A bunch of people at the office were circulating the latest link for the latest masterpiece by Kotaku's Brian Crecente: Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance . The usual jokes were flying around about how "Editor-In-Chief" means something different in America, and discussion arose as to when exactly Kotaku became (or desired to become) a science fiction pastiche of the real games industry. Deeply moved by the latest travesty from Kotaku Towers, I decided to get in touch with the big C for some constructive criticism. Here's how it went: TGAM: Hey. Just read your post about motion control in gaming. Thought I'd drop you a line to let you know it is one of the worst pieces of HTML pretending to be writing on Kotaku (FYI this is akin to saying it is one of the worst pieces of writing on the internet). Next time leave it to Leigh Alexander or someone else who can write their way out of a paper bag. It couldn't be more high school even if it ment...

So many piss jokes we don't know where to start. All the major gaming news networks reported that two Heavy Rain 'videos' were 'leaked' (when is the game out again?). One of which was the opening sequence, the other was gameplay of slutbungwulla having a shower and having a wee. We watched both videos on your behalf and here are our thoughts: 1) It is a fucked up world where a video of a virtual woman having a wee generates more interest than all those videos of virtual death and mass murder. Even more so that either of those kinds of videos drums up more interest than all that depressing 'news' stuff on real MDKs. 2) On the upside, the shower scene is so devoid of titilation (ha tit) that only the most frustrated of adolescents are in danger of getting aroused. However, it is really boring. This is an unattractive woman having a shower after a hard day at work perhaps? From what we saw she doesn't frig or hide the soap. She just showers a bit....

So yeah, it has been a while since I did a bit of blogeriferousness… What have I been up to? Well mainly I have been achievement whoring on Soul Calibur IV which is going well apart from the Tower being a bitch to get through. But in a strange twist of events I went back to Guitar hero 2 and 3 on the Xbox 360, after pretty much getting sick of Rockband. I have done the “Endless setlist” twice now, once on hard and then a second time on expert, though I totally nabbed out on the second time, as the guys I was playing with were on a lower difficulty, and I had got it in my head that I would still get the expert achievement… I have flirted with singin, but I really can’t sing, I failed “Tom Sawyer” on EASY! Though my Glados interpretation was apparently spot on! Drums bug the shit out of me, I’m not willing to put in the hours of practice needed to get my leg working independently of my arms. And bass just makes be really jealous of whoever is playing the guitar part. Then couple that w...

Fanboy…. It seems a harmless term, no? In most cases fanboyism starts when someone claims to prefer one system’s merits over another. Be it the aesthetic qualities, technological differences or accessibility. People generally have to choose one particular system due to pricing, and dependant on the “flavour of the generation” people will change their arguments. In the case of the current generation you have a new breed of Nintendo fanboy who chose that system because of the “innovative” Wii-mote, these people will claim that graphics are non-essential and that gameplay is core. Or in the case of the 360, more and more 360 fanboys are cropping up as previously PS2 players bite the bullet, and buy a 360 due to the extensive catalogue and pricing which the PS3 cannot currently offer. That’s all fair and good these are good reasons to buy the consoles. But it does not stop there, certain people then feel that they then have to either justify their purchase, either with almost religious li...

OK there was that video and then the really good official site and then that hideous sound as 100 million Nintendo fanboys and fangirls started typing up their wish lists. There was widespread panic and confusion. Despite the fact that it was very clear this still happened (check out the retarded comments). My favourite is this "Um…considering that Final Fantasy is only for Playstation, I doubt that they’d include characters from the series. If anything, it’d probably be a moogle or chocobo since they’re in pretty much every game of the series. I would, however, really like to see Sonic in this game (and Spyro)." Oh how they got called a 'noob' because everyone knows that the worst 6 Final Fantasies before it ('it' being FFVII the most acceptable of the series. That's right acceptable, not as good as you claim it was. Especially the 'story') were on the SNES. However, I can out-noob all the noobs who pointed out that this guy was a noob becau...

Griefing has been in games for a long time. A modern definition would certainly be mostly about racism, sexism and all the other 'isms' towards other players particularly in multiverses, MMORPGs and online games with text or voice chat. However, griefing has been around in games for a while. Lets look to the origins of this much maligned behaviour. Griefing first originated in games where you could directly affect other players. For me and the Catch The Monkey And Other Games B69 (the name given to the merry band of gamers that I used to play with) peeps the first precursors to griefing behaviour could be found in Micro Machines on the Mega Drive. A well timed nudge before a jump or on a thin walkway would send the other player spiralling to doom. Remember this is a Micro Machines before weapons and powerups. Then strategies would start to develop to counter act nudging. The classic braking before someone goes to nudge you means that they end up facing the other way and ...