That guy's a Maniac...

For those of us bored to tears by the prospect of VR (hey remember 3D TVs everyone? #GameChanger) and not interested in the two and a half games currently out on the Nintendo Switch at the moment, it is with some surprise that Ninty seems to be actively keeping the 3DS going for a it longer now. With the Nintendo Switch supposedly covering both mobile and living room play because, you know, people love to play video games on the go. When did you last see someone playing a handheld in public? Seriously? Think about it? I haven't had a StreetPass for 4 years now let alone seen a Vita in the wild. Nobody plays games on the go. Not in the UK anyway. It's just an advert to get mugged. Anyway, with the Switch now out, we'd assumed that the 3DS like the Wii, Wii-U and Gamecube before it, would have been instantly given a handful of ketamine and put on a life support drip with nothing but a few years of being pumped full of shovelware to con parents with before officially being

Right so, blizzard have brought out a card game thing. A. Card. Game. Not a massive expansive world, not a spin-off to Starcraft, not a rotational life cycle DoTA clone... A card game. Aaaand, its good, so fucking good! It shouldn't be, but it is. Right now its a PC game, again, it shouldn't be, but it is. Its a Mobile game that was beta'd on PC but just works great. I remember playing the card games like Pokemon Card game on the Gameboy Colour and even the old Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos PC games. And see its all its not about the mechanics of the game, which I will not bore you with, or the tie in to the WoW franchise; Its that the game is so beautifully polished and wonderfully balanced. All of the characters are unique and offer a different experience in play. The other impressive part is its free, entirely free. Well... Not really free, I mean it does give you the option to buy packs of cards which is very enticing because that is the only way to get new cards i

Yesterday I found myself trying to explain the origins of Puzzle Bobble, it went a little something like this: Well originally the characters are from a game called "Bubble Bobble" where little dinosaurs blow bubbles to trap enemies in them then burst them.* And this started me thinking, where is this type of game nowadays? It seems to have been relegated to the smartphone medium. All main blockbuster titles are a "man shooting another man." I find myself thinking what happened? Somewhere between PS2 and current gen all main characters became human , or at least human looking: elf, dwarf etc. I wonder if this is a safe bet from marketers that people can identify more with a human protagonist. I miss the abstractness the otherworldly environments, rather than the scant familiar distopyas emerging in all games. This atmosphere of breaking the rules of reality had existed in games for so long, creating characters and worlds within the constraints of the machine all

First up read this , it's Richard Browne (pictured below) from umm, well he's an industry veteran okay. And he's finally willing to bring to the table that much missing piece of evidence to prove that pre-owned games are killing kids, raising house prices and toppling the game industry. At last. Some actual evidence to scrutinise rather than a dev sounding off because their last poorly marketed shite game that sat on the shelves for two weeks didn't sell as much as Wii Sports . That key piece of evidence? A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. [via Gamesindsutry international ] Ah, okay. That appears to be an anecdote and a suspiciously tall tale. Bro

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.

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.

No. They are films. Except documentaries. They are TV shows? Anyway, we're already more than a line into this blog and nobody has looked at the wittle puppy. Look at the widdle puppy! This reminds us, if Nintendo and Capcom carry on this massive love in after Monster Hunter Tri then we we would quietly suggest a Nintendogs:Okamiden Version. Yes we would. In other news: this list is pretty interesting . If you are reading this on a feed reader then this is super secret text for you none of the other readers can see this but if they did make Nintenokamiden then they should totally allow bad touching to get the furries buying this sick filth. I'll take a 10% cut of all profits CapTendo. 20% if you allow bad touching. Cheers!

Even in the days of hype and over exposure where every screenshot, press release and 'leak' is vivisected and analysed there are still few moments in gaming that match the trepidation of loading up a game for the first time. Our personal ritual is to make sure there are no other distractions for the first spool up. The tea is brewed, the cat is fed, the phone is silenced, the meat is beat so that until we are prompted to press start our full attention is on the first impression of yet another new virtual world. Sometimes, the impression is a bad one, a misstep in the opening FMV, poor design or a hard to navigate menu dramatically drops the expectations. Sometimes games whisk you through the back door the first time you play dumping you straight into the game, a practice which we are always a bit suspicious about, for some people the mantle really does matter as much as the fireplace. Little King's Story had us completely charmed by the time we got to starting the game, the

Basically, keep it the same but have dual wielding then add a number 2 on the end.

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

We got a DSi XL from our favourite person in the world. It is a thing of beauty, an object d'art. The screens are huge and I can now check the internet from the toilet which, is pretty much living the dream. In addition, because the old DS touch screen was broken it now means that we can unlock those extra outfits on Project Rub, Spin that record in Resident Evil Deadly Silence and most importantly MATCH THE FACES! MATCH THE FACES, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, MATCH THE FACES, MATCH THE FACES, MATCH THE FACES, match the faces, match the faces, MATCH THE FACES! Match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces, match the faces

First can we say how sad it will be for all those who lose their jobs in the closure of 43 shops across the UK. Now that is out of the way can we now say good. Good riddance GAME. We tried to support you in the credit crunch crisis thingy but you didn't have the games we wanted a mere six days after launch . Also, I'm not entirely surprised at the closures either when your stores look and feel like a teenager's bedroom. We remember the days when GAME was merely an awesome mail order site and you'd order stuff from the back of a mag. We got Legacy of Kain, Resident Evil, Broken Helix and Tomb Raider from GAME before it became a shop*. Any and every title including the more obscure ones were available back then when gaming shops on the high street were basically for PC games and printers. To see it's horrid generic commercial horribleness now makes us sad :( *Just checked wikipedia. Our memories seem to be totally apocryphal. Maybe we meant Gameplay ? W/ever. OH MAN

The last Ubisoft game we bought was Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs. Until this DRM thing came up I didn't even know people played games on their PC. PCs are for making graphs and writing reports on. Jeez already. AMENDMENT 1: So is like Rayman on PC then? AMENDMENT 2: What happened to Rayman?

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