That guy's a Maniac...

We were so so lucky over Christmas we're in the ridiculous happy situation of having a stack of games to play through. We picked up Starship Damrey ,  Crimson Shroud, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Star Fox 64 3D, Fire Emblem Awakening , the Pokemon typing game and Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D . It's a great place to be, we're not taking this wonderful wonderful situation for granted. The only downside is what do we play first? Unfortunately, it looks like Nintendo eShop title, Crimson Shroud won't get a look in for a long time. We've played 6 hours of it so far. It got great reviews, technically it's an astonishing feat but with so much other gameplay to get through it's too.... well here's out quick thoughts (tm). What we liked The aesthetic. It looks like a lovingly detailed tabletop game complete with branded characters bases. The ridiculous depth of the statistics. You get to roll virtual die. Second only to rolling real die. 

A wee while ago we talked about Windows 8, the new PC OS from Microsoft. Now Mr Steam-Valve himself has spoken out about it . Mr Newell doesn't seem to like it, calling it a "Catastrophe" and potentially pegging Linux as a new platform for steam. Frankly it seems he is just scared to back Microsoft on this one, you know the major player in PC operating systems... Thatguys says: Windows 8 is not a bad platform, yes the schizophrenic nature of the metro interface and the desktop is a bit weird, and in the 10 months we have been using it we find ourselves ignoring the metro start-up screen and just going straight to the Desktop. "Why bother?" you say? Well, its faster straight up the loading time of windows is reduced immensely, and (we assume) the whole environment is more lightweight as games are actually faster and most importantly everything works. Windows 8 is essentially a faster, more stable (even in beta) version of Windows 7 so all those peripherals

Ugh I cant stop playing Taptitude. Yeah I know I have a Windows7 phone, get your giggling out. I had an android phone for a while, and where it is good with all the (then) free apps, its gimpy linuxy experience couldn't do simple stuff like texting or phoning... big fat fail for me. And Apple, well I'm still on the fence. Firstly I don't really want    to conform to the millions of "individual snowflakes"out there, and secondly  are still no proper games for Apple... there is iOS games, re-imaginings of older games, which look pretty much the same as they did ten years ago or jumped up browser games. They are pretty but not for me. So I decided to go for a Win7 Phone, it tied into my 360 account, its fast, it works, it's more user friendly than the other "smart" phones, but there is fuck all for it, and no fucker wants it, nobody believes windows may have a product that is "easy to use"  Anyways, there is a couple of games for win7 Ang

We bought BIT.TRIP Complete when it came out and we've voluntarily relegated ourselves to the naughty step for not telling the TGAM Massive all about it.  For those of you unawares, BIT.TRIP was a series of six Wiiware, PC and devices-beginning-with-a-little-i games that came out from 2009 until 2011. They got good reviews but we weren't tempted to take the gamble. Plus, downloading new Wiiware is preluded by an hour long mini game called "Try to micro manage the selection of Wii games and channels you want with the tiny amount of space the Wii hardrive has" which is not intuitive, slow as fuck and all-round frustrating. However, the gods of gaming have smiled upon us by using divine intervention to convince the publishers of BIT.TRIP to release all six games and a soundtrack as a boxed Wii game. It will never sell huge amounts. Despite being multi-platform the brand is not well known and you'd be hard pressed to know what the games are about from the box

I have been messing about with windows 8 recently. Just to see its compatibility with older games and just the general feel of it. Windows 8 upon start up presents you with a slide-to-unlock screen akin to the Windows Phone, though entirely pointless if you are not using a touchscreen (though a simple tap of the space bar works just as well, if not faster) you are then presented with an "app" screen. Its not too dissimilar to the windows phone or 360 interface, and feels a little iOS too, though it's debatable as to whether this is a good thing on a desktop/laptop: As you can see this is your typical workspace, undoubtedly designed for a touchscreen interface. You have apps (which when clicked on/tapped expand into their own fullscreen versions) as you can see, there is an inbuilt twitter/RSS/Weather and the Facebook app "Socialite" doesn't work currently. Those with keen eyes will also see Final Fantasy VIII! Well I just dug out my old copy of it an