That guy's a Maniac...

You know saying things are "like Marmite", is like Marmite you either love it or hate it. That's right there's no middle ground its black or white no shades of gray, no 6 out of 10's, its either 0 out of 10, or 10 out of 10! They are opposite ends of the spectrum, Violet and Red. missing out all the greens, blues, oranges and yellows in between. And Squaresoft are apparently the same, their games are either "teh SuXXorZ" or "Epic wins". After a slew of Epic wins: VII, VIII, IX, X, everything just seemed to go wrong for them, they made a very girly sequel to FFX, an expensive niche MMO (for PC AND consoles), a single player MMO at the end of a consoles lifecycle, and then XIII finally! After nearly 10 years since FFX, Square made an actual RPG where you level up your dudes and you know chocobos and stuff. But something was wrong... there was grumblings in the internet there was horrible talk of a 30 hour training section, but still we ...

Sexy-charged game Catherine has been hyped over the pond and beyond, but the EU have yet to get an actual confirmation on its release. Provisionally a few distributors have tagged this as December 2011, which is not unreasonable, with only its sub-risqué subject matter delaying (or perhaps even cancelling) its release. Catherine is set around a dude and his obsession with a girl surprisingly called Catherine and Katherine. Much of the sexyness of the game can be peeled back to a platform puzzler set in the protagonists guilty dreams. You know what? I'm just going to stop there, that is fucking cool. I know you can call it sleazy but c'mon my previous sentence... That's an original concept I'm playing it, Fuck all you nay-sayers saying it's for pervs. FUCK YOU. This game is worthy of my time, deal-with-it! Love and Guilty dreams about a game. Richie X

We get literally a dozen emails every four years asking us how we manage to write at least two hard hitting posts a month. Well reader here's a behind the scenes look at a post in progress, with directors commentary at the bottom. That's right, we're opening up the creative process to you the readers. Not at all because we can't be bothered to write anything proper. Who knows? This may inspire you to start up yet another video game blog because there aren't enough of those around!!!!!* Here it goes: With my wife away on business, I've spent hours and hours with my mistress. There's nothing quite as thrilling as sitting in my pants, opening a bottle of wine and spending the night with another woman. However, this other woman isn't Tracy from accounts, it's a woman called Cunzy1 1 who is mighty handy with a bowgun. Yes, after months of waiting I finally picked up Monster Huntr Tri for the nintendo Wii and I've gorged myself on it this last week and...

About 8-10 years ago we did a big ol' search for books about gaming and aside from hilarious compilations and dry history of computing books there was virtually (ha ha) nothing. Searching on Amazon this weekend and boy oh boy are there a load of books with interesting titles about video games (aside from Halo novels, Prima guides etc.): Exodus to The Virtual World, Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World, Casual Revolution, Introduction to Game Studies: Games and Culture, Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, Teaching Video Games (Teaching Film and Media Studies), More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form and a shed load of others. Sadly most of them are more than a bit hand wavy and 90% of them start with the same hundred or so pages pleading with the non-existent non gaming reader who accidentally picked up the book: "Games are important, my university tenure is so valid, games really are important". I recently went to a book shop to pi...