That guy's a Maniac...

Earlier this year, life-sim lite, Tomodachi Life came out for the Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunately 90% of the coverage from the red top gaming sites exclusively focused on Nintendo's controversial decision to exclude same-sex relationships in the game. In itself that decision rightly deserves highlighting but as ever, the proper journalism parodying gaming press reported nothing but this, resulting in a lot of coverage that failed to explain what a ' Tomodachi Life ' was in the first place. I don't know if Nintendo were happier to receive any coverage at all or unhappier that it was all negative. Interesting, especially given how the press fall over themselves to create content every time a GTA or Saint's Row comes out, with only a handful of the more thoughtful hacks sparing a sentence or two for the inherent misogyny, sexism and racism that those games portray (hastily followed by hand waivey 'but it's alright cos it's GTA isn't it?'). Anyway, tur...

With, it seems, the whole games industry writing off the Wii in preparation for the Wii-U, now is a great time to snap up some of the quirkier releases on the platform which are currently selling for ridiculously cheap prices. Recently we've picked up Cursed Mountain, Deadly Creatures, Metroid: Other M, Disaster Day of Crisis and Madworld for less than £16 (for all of them). Individually they are a bit quirky but they represent a time and a platform with more interesting ideas than current HD console gaming which seems stuck in a bit of a rut with a a severe case of sequelitis. Trauma Center: Second Opinion is one we snapped up for a fiver a while ago and we've only just got around to playing it. We played Trauma Center/re: Under The Knife, the one and only popular medical 'em up on the DS. It was fun, if not a bit tough and also challenging. The Wii version, Trauma Center/re: Second Opinion is pretty much exactly the same game albeit with a name change and with the a...

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...