That guy's a Maniac...

A while back my 3DS was dominated by the Pokemon flavoured Diablo clone: Pokemon Rumble World, a F2P game I actually spent money on... It was a great wee game but it got pretty grindy/repetitive/boring towards the end... I hit 719 Pokemon (yes I know there are more, but not in Rumble World!) And I'm done... Why am I telling you this? What is so fucking brilliant about completing the game? Whoop-dee-doo? Well, first of all that last one is not a question, and secondarily clearly you are interested since you are posing more questions. The real reason is I am not done, there is a plethora of other "achievements" one such would be to get every version of Areceus. This is the opposite of fun, this is grinding upon grinding. And there is plenty more like this, gaining all the "formes" of all the Pokemon with formes... So this is it, line has been drawn in the sand. I'm done, no more Pokemon Rumble world for me, no sir. Kaput. This is an Ex-F2P time sink....

Like all aspiring middle class people the only paper we buy is the Graudian and the Observer and every week we get a little bit angry that games are never covered in The Review supplement. That Travel and Sport get their whole own separate supplements is a bog post for another day. Like a lot of other gamers we're still waiting for an audible 'ding' to alert us to the fact that yes, games are now socially acceptable. If you so wished you too could hijack a dinner party/pub lunch with a boring lecture about games in the same way that it is acceptable for wine bores, travel bores and I've just popped a child bores to do. Even though games probably already are socially acceptable we're still waiting for the ding. The batman signal in the sky, the ironic t-shirt that becomes an unofficial trendy uniform, the endless historical documentaries on BBC4 or even our own OBE. Even more frustrating is that the Guardian do have a fairly decent crop of games writers who don't...

Yeah I’m sure we have all heard it, “Manhunt 2 – Banned in the UK”, for its Casual Sadism blah blah blah. Yeah the game uses a pretty nasty format, stalking and killing but hey I would like people to remember that it is a game. I would like to draw comparisons to Deerhunter: sneak up on the poor defenceless animal, blow its brains out… “Rejecting a work is a very serious action and one which we do not take lightly,” BBFC director David Cooke stated. “Where possible we try to consider cuts or, in the case of games, modifications which remove the material which contravenes the Board’s published Guidelines." Where do the differences lie then? Rather than a VIRTUAL generic forest, the game is set in VIRTUAL, dark, sordid, rust world. And rather than kill VIRTUAL mighty stags, the player can kill VIRTUAL human beings in VIRTUAL brutal ways. But yeah, we all know the generic formulae of Manhunt, stalk, sneak, kill. Seen a million times before, since the first stalk-em-ups on the or...