That guy's a Maniac...

Like listening to music? Stuck for suggestions? HG101 ran a poll and has come up with this massive list . Okay, so 1000 might be too many and yes, the list reads more like a snooty gamer's list of musics from those games that are darlings to the hardcore. Far too much music from games beginning with Chrono . Waaay too much Castlevania , Mega Man, Persona and Final Fantasy. But a valiant effort. I've spent the last few days going through the list and downloading some songs I'd forgotten or never heard of. Recently EDGE's Steven Poole bemoaned the lack of decent video game tracks these days. I don't know if there are less great tracks these days or that gamers of my generation just don't play games as much as we used to so there is less time for these songs to worm their way into our heads. I definitely have a soft spot for mega drive/ SNES era music and part of the reason for enjoying video game music (I almost exclusively listen to VGM or VGM remixes) is...

I have holiday and I've been trying to bust as many games that I've half started as possible. Kirby's Epic Yarn A lovely little game that appeared quite easy to 100%. I was wrong. Clocked it in at just under 20 hours in the end. Stupidly, I left all the challenges until the end so the last hours or so was just burning through the repetitive and sometimes tricky challenges. Soundtrackwise, many of the new tracks are as sublime as the classic old tracks. Fun. Little King's Story I'd put Little King's Story on the back burner for a long time. Typically because when I play it I get sucked in so I don't attempt to play it unless I know I have time free. It's a game that still gives even late on where lesser games tend to add all the padding. It is also still challenging although I do end up restarting a lot because I'v become very attached to a little hunter of mine called Stella. She was one of my first citizens, she's married to a guard and has ...

Oh Great Jaggi how Great are you? Not that great anymore the Great Baggi is greater than you you are still greater than jaggis and jaggias though So comparatively, your name is apt. The first time I tried to hunt you, you won. And the second time. Not the third time, although I did have help. Stupid shoulder barge That used to take off 80% of my health. Now it does very little. Go ahead. Call your buddies. All they do is dance around. Baggis spit ice stuff at you and make you sleep. Unless Cha Cha helps me. Cha cha never helps me. I'm gonna leave you in the village next time you little shit. Maybe I should sell all that Great Jaggi stuff In me box. BUT MAYBE I'LL NEED IT LATER. I'll hang on to it for a bit. See you around 'Great' Jaggi. In the meantime I need A Rathian Plate.

'MCV is the leading news site for the game industry. Check out our news, press releases and interviews.' Is the annoying tagline that comes with the first line of every news story from MCV from the comfort of my feed reader. I don't know but (checks...) yes. MCV's website is one of those horrible Gamespot format ones where it looks like someone has nose spewed onto the page and then garnished it with adverts mid- fucking-article. Just let the whole story through the feed reader and not just a tagline and let me choose whether or not I want to read more than two lines of your stories.

Just Monster Huntering. In the meantime, here's an image and some tasters for posts I won't write anytime soon 1) About the time I went to buy Monster Hunter 4 months after it was released and couldn't find a copy. 2) About the time I 100% Zack and Wiki after swearing a lot. Really really a lot. 3) About how there are no good British games bloggers left anymore now that Kieron Gillen left. 4) About how I tried to play Monster Hunter Tri online but was too scared.

Tits? Check. Big gun? Check. Progress is so over rated. This is a screensht from Koei's Samurai Warriors 3. Not Samurai Warriors 3 but the Capcom one that looks just like it. In other news. This is an image of the new pokemon called Scrapebotto. Scrapebotto is a scraping the bottom of the barrel type Pokemon. Other new Pokemon announced are household appliances (did that), letters of the alphabet (also done before) and a new Pokemon which takes the shape of other Pokemon . All the ideas have been used. All of them. Just go for a squirrel thing, a walking ball thing and a Dr Robotnik Pokemon . Oh FFS.

Bank Holiday Monday blogging! Once again, we've been watching the Nintendo Channel so you don't have to. Can we get a "slow news week"? Now the love affair with Monster Hunter is over there's not a great deal of new or good stuff on the Nintendo channel since last week . Those ace Warioware: Do it Yourself videos continue with Todd Lewis, that chap from Scribblenauts who makes a rather lovely micro game but who comes across as very very nervous under the pressure. Worth a watch and again, we hope these videos keep a coming. Penta Tentacles is a colourful flow-a-like from the 'artstyle' family which looks a little bit derivative if we are honest. Still, we'll reserve judgement from when we've had our hands on it and more than likely we'll find ourselves still up at 4am in the morning collecting floaty bits. There's a Dragon Quest IX trailer up, which as you can imagine looks like what you'd expect a Dragon Quest IX trailer to lo...

Thank god Most Painful Moments in Gaming is over. Not only did the frustration of my individual pains come flooding back but the pain of my right honorouble friends made me cringe anew. However all this frustration will be offset with next week's feature-creeping best moments. In the meantime, I'm going to take a quick butcher's at some of the stuff currently up on the Ninty Channel at the moment. I'm a big fan of the Nintendo Channel, I know not everybody is, but if I have some spare time I try to check it out once or twice a week to see what's new. This week: Monster Hunter Tri still dominates the channel with a massive 19 videos currently up. The latest video, bizarrely titled Hunting Jhen Moran Online is actually just a cutscene from the game (a fucking cool one nonetheless) advertising the now closed(?) event quest. The World of Monster Hunter Tri parts 1 to 6 and the World of Monster Hunter Tri Hunting Grounds set the scene for MHnewcomers but also st...

Flashpoint™©® is a new communicative medium brought to you by the team behind the TTECNK, Underboob and microfanfics . Flashpoints are flashpoints of discussion on the hottest topics in video gaming today. Flashpoint one is all about the wang. WANGS IN GAMES Richie!: Before we start can I just make sure we're not talking cross purposes. This is about penis right? Cunzy1 1: Yes. This is not about all those people called Wang or with Wang as a surname. This is about the depiction of the schlong in video games. R: I am basically for them just because, you know there will be a designer who went through 4-7 years of uni just to end up programming foreskin physics. C: Let's hope there aren't any bugs in the foreskin.... physics. LAME R: LAME WANG JOKES ALREADY. C: Lame penis rendering jokes aside I'm against wangs in games because if video games with violence in them cause people to be violent then games with wangs in them.... R: Will make people Chinese? C: Racist and no. I...

From the Graudian article about tax breaks and umm acceptability of games comes the following comment from Mr Macabre: It doesn't help the industry in this country when British landmarks ARE used in games they threaten to sue! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_the_use_of_Manchester_Cathedral_in_Resistance What do you think will happen if they set GTA V in a replica London? Ooooh I don't know? Imagine if we set a GTA in London. What would we call that game? GTA London maybe? Is that what we might call it you fucking muggy cunt. Oh god and it would cause all kinds of controversy! Oh and to prove it, here is the wikipedia link you grade A moron. We might even be able to think of a number of shoddy GTA clones set in London if we thought a little bit harder but we're too busy firing off moronic thoughts into the internet site looking to pick up chicks. Mr Massivetwat is evidence enough that we don't want games to be acceptable in the same way that we don'...

Apparently, Dittos* are going extinct, according to yesterday's newspaper the METRO. This is stupid. Everyone has a Ditto right? And they aren't fished, you just catch them in the grass. I have a spare if anyone is interested. Or find them at music festivals. But they aren't very good. By the time you have wasted a turn you are then in the unfortunate position in that your foe knows all your moves. We hate it when newspapers get all their shit wrong. Stupid newspapers. Sadly I only worked out Ditto wasn't great when it dinged level 89. *We know it should be Ditto not Dittos but we love annoying those wiki pricks who genuinely care about it. Because when the aliens find part of a server floating round in the space where Earth used to be, they're really gonna be concerned about the correct way of pluralising a fictional monster. Anyway if it does go extinct we won't have to worry about that.

Read it here . Basically, former who-is-that-guy-again? leader of the tory party, IDS has pulled a Vaz. This time though, avoiding Vaz's idiotic mistake a few weeks back, he appears to be aware of all the laws about selling stuff to people who aren't old enough to buy it all. He just says nobody pays attention. He also comes out with: “We are driving children to lose their childhood, and some video games are incredibly violent, like Grand Theft Auto. They are meant to be 18 but nobody cares what it says on the label." Fuck off IDS. Just fuck off. When was the last time you took a bus after 11pm in this country? That's violence right there. Real actual violence. In fact for anyone living in London they probably see violence every week. I know I do. And then of course there are violent films on TV all day every day which anyone can watch with no restrictions whatsoever. Oh and books. When was the last time you got ID(S'ed?) for a book? And even then. Even if 1997 gam...

Was the front page news the Metro was running today. Is it the first ever gaming news front page in a publication with semi-decent circulation? Probably. Anyway to the story as reported by the Metro. One gamer, cut off by MS had this to say: "I was gutted, completely gutted. It's like telling someone their dog's just died" Our thoughts on this. 1) Why is only people in newspapers say gutted. They are always gutted about things in newspapers but we all know nobody actually says gutted since the late 90s. 2)It is not like telling someone their dog just died because normally dogs last longer than a console generation, you can play with your dog any time regardless of whether you are connected/Xbox is working, you can entertain more than two people with a dog at any one time without having to set up Rock band, people know what a dog is, a dog is fully compatible with any dogs you may already have, girls are interested in dogs, you can take your dog outside or on holiday ...

This is breaking news. This news occurs nowehere else on google. It is regarding a weird noise you get when you die playing through Story Mode on Timesplitters 2. Here's how to access the noise. Start playing through story mode on Timesplitters 2. Die and then the restart/quit screen comes up with a big floaty blue thing in the background with some loud music. Just put the pad down and listen to the music. It trails off and then you get some scary noises. Then right right right at the end after the scary noises a woman's voice asks "Is that too much?". In the interest of full disclosure here is the email I have sent to LEGEND Graeme Norgate for info: Hi Graeme Huge huge fan! Huge. I became aware of your work through Timesplitters and restrospectively found out you did the music on Killer Instinct too! What a legend. We used to listen to Killer Cuts all the time until the CD wore out. Anyway fandom aside I was playing through Timesplitters 2 again last week (Siberian D...

This post is one of those 'interesting' insights into our lives posts. Ignore it if you are just looking for that Sheva nude cheat or for more of our ultimate top 50 greatest games of all time posts. It ain't here. Recently we went on holiday for a bit. This meant that there were thousands of bits and pieces of stuff to read on our feed reader. There's no way to read it all now. We're way too busy so here's a little insight to how we rationalised it: Deleted everything from the Escapist . The only reason the Escapist is on there at all is for Zero Punctuation. And that comes out every Wednesday. And we know that. Should really get round to unsubscribing . Deleted everything from Capcom Entertainment . Which was a total of 1 post. Why do official developers and publishers websites suck balls so hard? Deleted Omastar Twitter feeds . Self explanatory really. Although, Omastar currently has 200 more followers than TGAM does :( Deleted everything from Penny Arc...

So.... Spore. Guess we were right about that one then. Anyone still playing it? Anyone at all? No. Told you so. Little Big Planet. Team TGAM doesn't own a PS3 for a number of reasons, the one we most like to pretend is true is because we have standards. The real excuse is that the fucker is still too expensive and there still aren't anywhere near enough decent games to justify a purchase. Anyway, if we did have one I would probably get LBP because I like creating shit in games like gay little designs for Animal Crossing, Crap Levels in Timesplitters or Miis that look like Charles Darwin. We do have some friends (21 to be exact). And some of those friends own a PS3 (12) they aren't gamers in the classic sense. They are normal people with cars and houses and the like. They don't obsess over games or write 2 and a bit games blogs. Aside from dusty copies of Resistance they all own LBP and without exception: 1) Haven't even tried to make their own levels. So...

Let's check. The last time we paid any attention to the "little handheld that could" there was nothing going on. From field data gathered by observing people using it on the bus and on the train it seems that 98% of them use it to watch Family Guy or South Park episodes. The other 2% play GTA. Apparently, it can connect to the PS3. Which is a shame because the PS3 is probably the least useful thing an appliance could ever connect to. In fact plugging your PSP into the ground probably offers up infinitly more exciting gaming opportunities. And what of those "games" that Sony used to do? Hmmmm Tekken is the best game for the PSP according to Gayspot. Looking at Metacritic there has only been one game post launch better than Lumines and Wipeout. Thems are four years old y'all. Well I do not know about you but I certainly can't wait for PSP Go! to play those four year old games on. Can you?

Because copying and pasting articles from the magazine and news from Kotaku can get really really tiring quite quickly.

Hotlinking to some news that's been all over my boink today. For those of you who are lazier than we, the premise is to slap a tax on violent video games to ugh cut knife crime, Britain's second favourite national sport. We don't think the tax is a good idea because a) People who stab other people don't buy games, they steal them at knifepoint duh and b) People who play games don't stab people*. They stay at home and play games. I'm all for reducing knife crime but I think there is a better way to be going about it, like nuking Britain from space until knife crime goes down or mass sterilisation of people who wear caps. However, I am in favour of slapping taxes on Theme Hospital to improve the NHS and we should tax the fuck out of Train Simulator to keep trains running on time. Taxes on Katamari Damacy to cure cancer etc. etc. *Excluding FIFA, Halo, CoD, GoW, the other GoW and MySims.

For reasons not to be divulged here, I had a week off of work and for reasons too painful to recount here I spent most of it on the sofa playing games. Sad perhaps but a week I thoroughly enjoyed as I relived the glory days when I could really get my teeth into some games rather than snatching the odd hour or two or playing games and then dreaming of playing them for the rest of the week, the routine that modern life forces us into. I played the Wii exclusively, proving that you don't need marines in space or space marines on planets or future marines fighting nazis to have a good game session. Here's the synopsis for all none of you out there who are at all interested: Dead Rising chop til you drop (or shop til you drop as one googler who found this site typed in). I still can't decide whether this is a good game in its own rights, a yorke notes version of a good game or just a bad game. Having played through it all of four times now, I am still none the wiser. Per...