That guy's a Maniac...

Last year, Nintendo made the slightly uncontroversial and in line with what competitors have been doing for decades business decision to start charging for the service to play games online with the Nintendo Switch. In order to sweeten the deal somewhat a paid membership gets you access to online play, exclusive offers (such as cosmetics in some games and those stupid but cool but stupid but expensive but worth it NES Switch controllers), sometimes cloud saves and most controversially gives you access to a growing library of NES games playable as long as you're subbed up. Some vocal gamers, however, did not like this decision at all because they either already own and play the NES games on offer (lies nobody ever intentionally bought Super Dodge Ball let alone played it on the go) or they didn't want the NES games but wouldn't mind free N64 games or SNES games perhaps? Like winged monkeys with neckbeards they took to social media en mass to whine about it. This level of...

This time from should-know-better David Braben. EDGE 'have' the story Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V from Gamasutra. Every now and then someone from the games industry will raise their head above the parapet and blame pre-owned games for their own poor sales without a shred of evidence to back it up. Here's choice quote from Braben on why pre-owned is killing single player games: I mean, the idea of a game selling out used to be a good thing, but nowadays, those people who buy it on day one may well finish it and return it. And of course, marketeers not marketing games after launch week really helps too right? Oh and the so called gaming press asymmetrically hyping a game up to launch then dropping coverage as if the game never existed once it is actually out has nothing to do with it? Perhaps devs should make a game that last longer than a day or even games that people might want to keep? Presumably, Braben has data for how pre-owned has adversely affected Frontier Developments...

So Xbox has brought out this new online. What what the hell does it do? Well, out of curiosity i signed up, it tracks your most played games and gives stats on them. There is also a reward point scheme, these seem to be septate from Microsoft points, in the same way that Tesco clubcard points are not real money. Other than that, you seem to be able to earn points based on renewing your membership to gold, or subscribing to sky player, oh and doing a survey about your "media" plans for summer. Right now there is no actual information on the types of rewards other than points. So what is it for? As far as I can see it's a glorified Clubcard, Nectar Point etc reward scheme, but with intangible  ways of collecting points, and also for undisclosed rewards. It all seems a bit bollocks for now, especially since the "rewards" will only count from the point you signed up for it (being a XBLA subscriber since 2007 this bugs me) Ah well lets see ...

Richie pointed me in the direction of this Wall Street Journal articl e (via a pretty piss poor editorial on the article at ripten). Now we were all geared up for writing a rebuttal but actually we did that over three years ago . Turns out that Kay Hymowitz has gone up in the world from turning trashy poorly researched diatribe on Dallasnews into a book called Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. Sadly, she didn't really use the time for any rewrites or even to update the references. If she can't be bothered then neither can we so Kay if you are reading this here's our tops tips to you getting a clue: 1) Read Replay A History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan and you'll realise that your trendy mac which you use to google yourself on as is virtually every piece of software you use is a product of gaming. Surely the hypocrisy of you using these technologies to disseminate your moronic ideas isn't lost on you? 2) Three years ago we'd alread...

As the other three people in the UK who stop to actually use the other Wii channels may have noticed, via a message from ninty, that playable Wiiware demos are back! It used to be the case that you could try a handful of the download service games helping you decide whether to buy or not but for unknown reasons nintendo stopped the service which was annoying. We have issues with all of the downloadable games platforms on all the current generation of consoles but demos work really well on the Xbox 360 and used to on the Wii. Otherwise, of course, spending those Wii points on an unknown entity can result in players never using it again (missing out on gems like Swords and Soldiers, World of Goo and our favourite Lit). So we welcomed the change. Furry Legends (Gamelion), Jett Rocket (Shin'en Multimedia), ThruSpace (Nintendo) and Zombie Panic in Wonderland (Akaoni Studio) are currently available. We managed to scrounge up enough free blocks (sorry Today and Tomorrow channel but you we...

Read it . The first part of the article is excellent observational humour and the whole thing sms up the frustration most of gamer kind has come across at some point. Brooker even picks up on the lack of gaming celebrities thing . However. A few comments down and we get the age old console wars stuff, some game snobbery, LULZ I'm a girl, aren't games addictive? etc. the usual stuff. Games may have become a bit more widely appreciated but gamers sure as hell aren't. I'm officially ex-communicating the gaming community until it levels up a bit. Starting. Now.

Yet again the technology companies are pushing the technology that we didn't want or even ask for. PSPGo has been creating some headlines with some rolling their eyes and others heralding the dawn of the package-less game. Like they did with mobile games. And all those other times. If you are anything like us, you have some severe reservations about it all. One of them being that the average person who plays games doesn't buy games mags, they don't even know about metacritic , they probably don't follow gaming blogs, the still go to the high street to buy their games and they probably haven't even taken their console online and if they have they probably have not downloaded any games let alone check the new releases every week. This is the average gamer. These are the people that saw the Wii soar to the heady heights. This is not your average forum lurker. This is not your average office of game journos. This is why many many great games perform underwhelmin...

OCs fans may recognise this comic as Omastar Comics 11 but with a different last panel. This was the original ending to this comic but when we ran it past test audiences they reacted pretty negatively towards it even with the ace black sludge cameo. We agonised for hours over it but decided to cut it for the final release. This version accidentally slipped into our display at Comic Con last year and the feedback from the fans was overwhelmingly positive, which shows you should stick to your gut feeling. This is by far my favourite ending and as you can see with this original ending Omastar's comments in panel 2 now make more sense. In other gaming news: Left 4 Dead 2- Yeah but is it really any better than Resident Evil Outbreak file 2? Madden again- Which means that all the US gaming sites become boring and unintelligible for a month or two. Resident Evil 5- Still playing and loving it.