That guy's a Maniac...

Games. Cost. Money. well, in most cases, unless: You are a thief or pirate. You have managed to get some bundle with free titles  Some 24 hour Xmas day promos to get game X (released X years ago).  Or! That one time many years ago Xbox gave away a submarine game (?!) cuz Xbox live was buggered. Games are odd beasts, they offer literally infinite hours of entertainment. Yet through the variety of platforms such as, Steam or PSN Store, and somewhat even when they were physibles, we 'collect' them, literally increasing our potential hours played to the schoolyard idiom of "Infinity x2" There are SO MANY out there competing for your attention. Most of them frantically and avidly jumping, shouting and screaming, while the hypetrain still has momentum - just after their release window. But slowly as they begin to age, the respective platform stores (valve) start to hug them tighter bringing them close to their bosom, they whisper sweet nothings, offering the

On August 27  Blizzard is launching their WoW re-boot: WoW Classic.  15 years ago, as our steadfast and loyal readership will remember, I just wouldn’t shut up about WoW, offering almost daily updates on the most mundane aspects of my (crappy) fire mage. And I shall be re-joining the masses this August, this time as a Human Paladin.  I have dipped my toe in and out of WoW, over the course of its evolution, to it’s current iteration. Though I have not partook in the past 3-ish expansions. WoW has changed a lot it's so fast paced and it’s almost impossible to die, but I will lay out my grumbles on what it has become at another point . One of my favourite things in WoW was “Transmog”, which initially was collecting pieces of armour or weapons and by taking it to a dude in-game, he could make one look like the other. Previously this worked by having to own the armour you wanted to Transmog with, resulting in bags and banks full of low level armour. Nowadays, however you “colle

Every now and then a conversation sparks up round the water cooler at TGAM Towers that goes along the lines of someone asking "So is gaming mainstream yet?". Hours, insults, fisticuffs and a reminder on policy on worker in the work place later, inevitably the conclusion is a firm not yet .  We're not expecting an overnight transformation. But what would it take?  We have game inspired video games at the Box Office (okay so they're rarely great), Final Fantasy menus in restaurants, Splatoon and Pokemon collaboration ranges with Uniqlo, LEGO collaborations with Blizzard, Midway and SEGA. Museum exhibitions on video games, design and art. Gaming content seemingly dominates large swathes of the Internet from Youtube through to Youporn. Yet admitting that you choose to spend your time playing video games every now and then still feels, in the UK at least, akin to admitting that you strictly only eat the faces of babies because that's where the softest meat is.

Flame rounds  lets us fulfil our yearning passion to be Frank Skinner, taking on his role as Judge, Jury, and Executioner in Room 101. We will be presenting a case for a particular Trope/Character/Item/UI element that pisses us off and then trying to justify whether this thing should go into room 101 (get flame roundsded?). Cunzy1 1: What're you selling? Richie:  Fucking ice levels, most specifically that annoying inertia slide which get applied to your main character. Annoying, get some crampons. Cunzy1 1: Are we just going to cycle through 90's gaming tropes is that it? We had five original ideas and are now just rehashing our old forum posts? Richie:  Looking back at our archive we are subconsciously rehashing ourselves over and over again. Ironically we are probably the only blog in existence with the label "bored of the same arguments" however time for us to take a long hard look in the mirror, sunshine. Doesn't make slipping on ice a game that is

Flame rounds lets us fulfil our yearning passion to be Frank Skinner, taking on his role as Judge, Jury, and Executioner in Room 101. We will be presenting a case for a particular Trope/Character/Item/UI element that pisses us off and then trying to justify whether this thing should go into room 101 (get flame roundsded?). Cunzy1_1: What're you flaming? Richie: So you have completed the story of this sandbox game. Congratulations! Now go to all these places on the map and find 100 of this thing. I hate this! So many games, specifically around the advent of achievements and trophies, would have this additional achievement to walk round the map finding glowing orbs or such.  They dub it in the name of exploration, but is just often descends into a nightmare of keeping track of an online item location guide. This is also usually coupled with a lack of any reward short of perhaps a 10GP blip. Tacked on and just annoying. Cunzy1_1: But Richie, people spent a long time meticulou

Tl;dr, No. Every so often a new flavour of mobile game comes along and you download it. Now your reasons for downloading it could be many: It has characters/personalities/endorsements from TV/Movies/Games and you like them. Giant anime titties or inferred nudity Some other brainwashed cunt tells you "It's different, this one is good"* It has been sold to you as the mobile version of [x] game which you used to play on [insert nostalgic actual gaming platform] *This is because he/she spent money on it, and the poor fucker is spreading their misery: isolate them, identify them as the problem, and destroy them.  There is a secret option here, which is it's own backward-ass problem You bought a console port - Well done you! Now go play it for 15 mins, get nostalgic, and promptly realise that it is not fun to play with touch screen controls and your big ol' thumbs are in the way, covering the UI.  I am a victim of this too, I can name a load of m

We're old. We're decrepit geriatrics. You can tell because we use Twitter to find out things. And this Monday we were somewhat blindsided by a game called Ajax Heroes a battle royale shooter from a studio probably full of people who wear long sleeve shirts underneath their t-shirts who made one of those other online shooters, no not the one with the purple lesbian, another one. Firefall? Rain Legion? Over Damned? A stealth release is quite an impressive thing in this day and age but aside from the same veiny eyed forum cranks muttering about gossip and rumour previously, first thing Monday morning there was barely a peep about this game and then at half eight GREENWICH MEANTIME this nonsense: A stream of blue tick 'influencers' making generic non committal statements about a game which at that point was all of 20 minutes old. Which, I don't know, is a modern master class in how to do it. Stealth release, get the old mags and the influencers to &

Hey sports fans. Long time no see. The reason why I've been absent from these pages leaving Richie to hold the fort since January is because I got burnt out by video games. This probably happens to most gamers every now and then but since January this year, I've just become so frustrated with games and the games industry I pretty much cut them out of my life for a while.  I haven't stopped playing them. At the moment the magical trilogy of Resident Evil Revelations, Pokemon Y and Fire Emblem: Awakening in my 3DS keep me ticking along but my perception of what the video game journalists and industry would consider, I'm not really playing games. Those games are old. Nobody is talking about them still. Why play those? Why not shell out a still-ridiculous amount of money for a new console that it appears nobody wants and nobody seems to know what to with.  I get a bit obsessive about things and most frequently, video games is one of those things I obsess about. I&

We've been on a bonanza of buying older Wii games to add to the collection. We avoided the original Red Steel on account of the awful reviews but wanted to try Red Steel 2, partly because it's one of the few games to use Wii Motion Plus. We're about halfway through but feel it's enough to put down some thoughts about it. It's a perfectly functional if somewhat generic game. The motion controls irk at first, swordplay isn't mapped one to one to the Wiimote, the reason for this is so that a multitude of attacks can be mapped to flick, twisting, holding and tapping buttons in combinations with flails. After a couple of hours the controls become second nature and every enemy encounter can be played a number of different ways similar to the encounters in Resident Evil 4 . It's not quite mindless and if you aren't paying attention every enemy goon can take you out.  Oddly, the game  just sort of starts. There's very little in the way of introdu

Our part of the Internet is all a flutter about A not THE Steam Box (Piston or something) and now some biometric gaze tracking thing but I for one couldn't care less. Note, American friends it is couldn't care less not could care less. Could care less means that you still care about something. You could lower the level of care about something. Couldn't care less. Could Not. Anyway, I'll probably never be a PC gamer. Don't get me wrong I think PC games can be brilliant. Rock Paper Shotgun is my little window into the world of PC games and every now and then I'll get a little bit jealous of the gaming opportunities I'm missing out on. I love the stories that come from the RPS team and the unique gaming experiences that can only be had with mods, indie platformers almost as good as older platformers, the 'five second' games and loser generated stuff that really reaches into the upper echelons of what gaming is capable of being. On the other hand t

Making what passes for 'news' today is the story that the X-Factor final last week had the lowest viewer figures since 2006 . Why might this be? Well we can speculate. People may be tired of the format, people may have better things to do on a Saturday night. TV may need to reexamine the way it judges the success of failure of shows because with so many ways to catch up online, on mobiles or through set top boxes that allow pre-recording. The notion of having to be sat at home to watch something at a fixed time (complete with annoying ads) is probably alien to people of the generations after mine. They may have just found the contestants boring or figured that it wasn't really a contest anymore given that the finalists comprise an uncharismatic Liverpudlian, an uncharismatic shy guy (not that kind) who insists on having a haircut that makes him instantly unlikeable and the one who can actually sing and seems a bit interesting. These all sound like possible causes for the

We're... urgh... digital natives and we're now of the generation where mainstream media journalists don't really represent us. They's falling over themselves to appear trendy and more than a little obsessed with Twitter. Last week we read a fascinating story in the Evening Standard about Z-Celebrities reactions to Z list Celebrities leaving Celebrity reality shows for 'medical reasons'. This was whole page. This is loser generated content at it's worst and for those of us who grew up on the mean streets of long forgotten forums and who cut our teeth trolling wicca websites the constant obsession with who said what onTwitter and the sheer laziness and naivety of reporting drives us insane. Richard Bacon's answer to the problems of Trolling (pronounced Trollllling not trole-ing apparently) is to make everyone's profile with their real name and photo.  yeah, because RealID worked out really well . Anywho. Who are we to complain? We're just the