That guy's a Maniac...

The other day we were reading the TGAM archives and laughing out loud at ourselves. Out loud. That’s pretty wrong no? But it was when we were reading the TGAM archives that we realised that WE ARE FUCKING GAMING CELEBRITIES! Yes folks, without actually knowing it we went from mediocrity to gaming celebrity stardom. Like that news about the goose that levelled up and became a swan that time. Here is the story about how we discovered we were celebrities (this will probably be in our second autobiography when we publish our book now we are gaming celebrities). We got a link on Kotaku once and not one of those news stealing links a proper link for creating something unique. Our best friend totally met Pentadact , secretly James secretely Tom at University. He even emailed him to check and Tom emailed back. What a nice chap. We insult Richard Cobbett on a regular basis and he doesn’t even hate us. We interviewed that photographer who did the Devil May Cry shoot for Front magazine. We are...

Gaming is trying hard to be mainstream, even though it already is but not in the way many gamers gamers can appreciate because they are too busy grinding and cyberring to spend enough time in the real world. A world without elves and muscle men and barrels and princesses and invisible walls. One thing that might help the deluded to believe that gaming is more mainstream is if we create some Gaming Celebrities. That way we join the common woman by slating off how fat, ugly, beautiful, stylish, hideous and underweight our favourite gaming people are and we can OMG to our hearts delights every time Jeff Minter takes a crap and it makes headlines. Our part in all this is to interview the top 100 gaming celebrities pushing them from blogosphere obscurity to the heady heights of celebrity and maybe see them take part in ice skating, ballroom dancing and orgies-on-islands television programmes like real celebrities do. This is not Leigh Alexander. We emailed over 500 gaming celebs and...

It is nearly the end of 2008. Which means it is nearly time for all the vidjogame blogs to start posting "top 100"s and retrospectives of the year. Here at the laughable TGAM we make no exception and are virtually thrilled to review the trash we put out throughout the year. January 2008. No. No. I just can't be bothered. There's too much to look at and it wasn't that great to start with. New initiative. Here are some of the best and worst bits of TGAM this year. Best Bits. Probably the Hotel Dusk review if I was being not very modest. The Front magazine interview and photos continues to generate 98% of our traffic and visitors stay for just under 18 seconds presumably before clearing the search history and logging off. Worst Bits. The ten days of Dante-mas which to be fair we did bother to finish but perhaps ten days was too long. No, it was too short, we did eleven days of Dante-mas. Yeah, eleven days was too long and the game wasn't even...

For all the imploring for games to become more mainstream and "accepted", for all the essays by pretentious hacks trying to read more into gaming than is necessary, for all the protests and for all the forum threads that go on for years about the best characters or the top ten...... For all the social and political commentators bigging up the merits of games for education and art. For all those and more it must be pretty galling to see that Pro Evo just knocked FIFA off the top sales spot. That's right, for all your whinging and whining about games the meatheads have it. The yearly update to a football game is what most real people are interested in. A game about a game where unnaturally shaven millionaires play football against each other. Unlucky.

This christmas is gearing up to be a good one and already it's very heavily video game oriented. The TV is running Hitman the movie ads almost every ad break and the trailers for Assasin's Creed and Need for Speed Pro Street are popping up quite a bit, as well as others. They seem to be good adverts too, grown up ads, no longer the reserve of horrible ALRIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT American voice over tat or Sony wankery they used to be. This month's EDGE has an interesting schpiz on marketing for games and how much money is thrown at the great unwashed on marketing alone. Up to 15 percent of a game's net receipts is spent on marketing and for titles released worldwide for christmas up to £7 million is being spent. Recent discussions with Giant Enemy Guitar Hero suggest that PR and advertising may be the way to go about getting your game off the shelves regardless of unfulfilled promises by developers and publishers in pre-launch hype. The oft cited poor initial receptions ...

So STFU and be happy! You get a whole weekend of fun and freedom! Oh you want a benchmark for how happy you should be? Be this happy Have a nice weekend!