That guy's a Maniac...

Remember the Nintendo Wii? It has a channel called the Mii Contest Channel where every now and then Wii owners, should they choose of their own free will, can create Miis to match a theme and vote on the submitted Miis. Many of you may have resigned the Wii to gathering dust but there are still a fair few people who obviously spend a lot of time just creating new Miis. We've been astonished at the diversity of creations from a fairly accurate Lady Gaga through to Wookies, Simpsons characters, Aliens, Robots and even the Mona Lisa a Mona Lisa faced woman. Back to the contests, once a new competition is announced either due to stark homology or a severe lack of creativity, creations tend to all look alike and fit within certain cultural tropes. Any competitions about science or intelligent ends up with hundreds of Einstein Miis (white shirts obligatory) being submitted. Competitions about righteousness or grace, expect Princesses (white or pink shirts). Anything to do wit...

It's our first look at the Wii's Nintendo Channel in 2012 ( here is all the previous Now Showings). What will the hit-and-miss Nintendo channel bring this year? Our money is on- inconsistent videos, series that inexplicably end after one or two videos and in general poor use of an otherwise extremely well placed marketing tool. So what do we have? Bizarrely, Nintendo TV  the monthly show from the Official Nintendo Magazine, has been reset back to episode one again for the new year. There's now a woman presenter rather than that Welsh chap but sadly it seems the script writer hasn't changed. Expect cringey dad-joke "humour" in spades. One improvement in this awful ONM vehicle is that the episode is now divided up into different sections. Hopefully this means we won't get quite so many Mario/Zelda retrospectives/love letters. There's two tutorial videos up for Boom Street , Nintendo's odd Dragon Quest/Mushroom Kingdom/Monopoly game. The tra...

We buy EDGE. We read EDGE. We are EDGE readers. Randy Smith writes for EDGE. We've previously wished that Randy Smith didn't write for EDGE. However, we may have to renege our wishes because he has written a nice article about Why Dead Rising Stands Out From The Hord e. As with all good game writing h e has perfectly enshrined my thoughts into words, thoughts I didn't realise I had until I read this. I love Dead Rising (including the Wii port). Randy sums up why. It's that feeling of me against the Horde. The way I play the game changes from moment to moment. I might be trying to save survivors, I might without really noticing it, decide to eradicate all the zombies from a particular area. I might just stroll about the casino/mall checking out the environment but always with one eye on the nearest group of goons. I know what I want to do and most of the times there's hundreds of zombies in between me and my own personal objective. Things go well I move on to the ne...

Silent Hill, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil , Beyond Good and Evil, Zone of the Enders, Ico and SoTC and Halo Anniversary. All of these franchises have HD re-releases due out or out already. Although, we're hugely appreciative that older games are kept alive we're fans of being able to play the versions we already own. Important to note that aside from the original Halo it is impossible to play SH, DMC or RE on current generation platforms (okay so if you have an old PS3 or Wii you could still play some of these). But of course, HD re-releases are different from straight up re-releases but I can't shake the feeling that this kind of stuff is happening because the ideas are running out. Is this spate of HD re-releases a confession that this generation really wasn't much cop for innovation besides a graphical enhancement? Team TGAM is probably split on the issue but I'm of the opinion that technology has progressed faster than game designers and developers can keep up ...

Pokemon White Pokedex. SEEN 642 OBTAINED 640 Probably won't mean a lot to most people. The translation is, I've spent a shit load of time on this game and I've only got 8 more Pokemon left to get*, five of which have never been made available in Europe. I spent a long time yesterday trying to get two more. Each generation of Pokemon games is normally released in two editions (possibly with a third remake). Red and Blue, Gold and Silver, Ruby and Sapphire, Diamond and Pearl and Black and White. The "genius" move is that some Pokemon are only available on one version and not the other requiring players to trade with each other or failing that buying both copies of the game to ahem, catch 'em all. In the DS iterations of the games, trading has been made much easier with the Global Trade Station. You don't have to physically meet up with another player, you can go online and leave a Pokemon of your choice on the GTS, specify what you want in return and nine ti...

I was on the continent for Christmas and when I wasn't dying I was pining for some gaming action. It was Christmas after all and for me Christmas just isn't Christmas without the family gathering around the yearly multiplayer game or gaming long into the night, freed from the constraints of early starts the next morning. Just after Christmas, the wife and I went into town. She spent shit loads of money on books ("they're for work") which normally gives me free reign to spunk some dough on a new game. The problem was nothing that I wanted was reasonably priced, what I did want and was probably reasonably priced wasn't stocked and even games that were just over reasonably priced and that I kind of wanted I was put off by the couloured triangle on the spine of the box ruining the gaming shelf ( Dead Space Extraction's yellow triangle already taunts me every time). I then spotted a copy of 1000 video games to play before you die but it was more expensive in ...

The unreliable eurogamer has an interesting piece just up about some guy who made the blogeadlines back in 2007 by ranting against the Wii at GDC. That's fine, each to their own but what Hecker does go on to say is the kind of idiotic rhetoric that gets our goat here at TGAM. From the linked article: "Game design and gameplay is not separable from CPU power," he told Eurogamer. "You can do more interesting games with a faster CPU. Nintendo made an underpowered platform, relative to what you could have made at the time. This in itself is theoretically uncontroversial but is moot in reality. Where are all these 'more interesting games?' on other platforms? We've said it time and time again but the reason why at least one of us isn't writing off the Wii as an acceptable console is because now, perhaps more than ever there is a real dearth of diversity of good games across all the current generation of games. Furthermore, the quality of graphics with Xbo...

The excellent Everybody Votes Channel on the Nintendo Wii has the uber Web 2.0 option for (l)users to submit questions for future polls. About a month ago I made the following suggestion: This has still not been a question on the channel yet so something must have gone wrong when I sent it in to Nintendo. I have emailed them this JPEG this time so they definitely won't miss it. Expect to see this question on the channel soon!

Bank holiday Monday is for plans, plans, plans and then those plans getting totally scuppered by The Yesterday Channel (the past is always present) and back to back episodes of Nazi Hunters. Spontaneous thought for the day: when will games be able to 'do' the liberation of concentration camps with the due gravitas? Looking to the awful (single player) Modern Warfare 2 (awful game, awful story and awful schlock tactics) which in many ways is the (inappropriate) poster child for games if not gamers, I'd say not for another decade at least. So instead of generating actual new content now that the bank holiday has been practically spent, I'm going to write up my thoughts of the MCM expo whilst they are still fresh in my mind. Firstly, the day involved at least five types of queueing but fortunately, impromptu games of identify the cosplayer made all the queuing a bit more palatable. For a ticketed event, you would assume that the venue would have been a little bit more prep...

DEFCON 2 is when we all stop banging on about "what happened to...." and start complaining that "they will ruin it" already. The Ace RPS has the link with the scoop but it looks like we're probably one step nearer to something Syndicate*. *Of course, here at Kotaku we tirelessly check all the sources we link to right back to the horse but if it turns out this is some kind of joke then I pity the fool who clearly has no understanding about words like "joke" or "humour". So it says here on your CV that you were the one who started the 2010 Syndicate joke? How does that joke go again? Oh. Yes. That isn't really a joke is it? That's just retarded. No you cannot have a job here and furthermore we'll see to it that you never work in this principality again!

Yes citizens, the hype machine for Heavy Rain has sprung to life, opened up one evil eye and focussed it on the sky. Recently, Heavy Rain TV spots have been appearing in between televised shows about cooking and ice skating and all those Wii adverts that dominate the idiot box. We know, we know, you are dying to hear our verdict on them but first we interrupt this post for yet another look at 5/10 butterface leaning against the window in her pants. There's no way around it. She just isn't attractive. Well done feminism. You won! Anyway, back to these TV ads. I can't find any of the videos online (depressing in 2010) but basically, if you were a non gamer and you saw them you wouldn't realise that Heavy Rain supposedly represents gaming at it's best, gaming of the non running and shooting and inspiring high school killers kind, gaming for the thinking person. In fact I'd shoot the marketing team behind the spots because it makes the game look more like a video g...

Internet fiend and Leaderboard legend the Hockster just gave us the tip-off about the new Resident Evil 4 HD version. We're pretty sure this is breaking so you'll see it in a TTECNK on lesser sites soon. Here is the original: Here is Resident Evil 4 HD. You can see that Capcom, fingers burnt from Resident Evil 5, have played it safe and set the whole thing in Asia land. Can't racist yourself! Except you are being racist if you just racist yourself and not everyone. Try again Capcom.

So in our random fumblings in the vast soiled panties that is the internet, we stumbled across "My Brute" where you create a little fighting character where random features and stats are created by the name you enter. Anyways this is a shameless shout-out to all the readers/haters/random-perverts-looking-for-Sheeva-nude to follow the link below and help the thatguys brute level up, follow the link below to become our pupil, and well... beat us up. http://thatguys.mybrute.com/ Luv n HugZ Richie XXX

From Daemon Hatfield's review of Dead Rising chop Til You Drop over at mediocre at best 'IGN'. "the story is…well, it's one of the worst stories I've ever encountered in videogames" Really Dougy? Worse than Final Fantasy VII or VIII? Or Halo? Or Gears of War? Or Katamari Pisacy? Or any MMORPG? Or puzzle game? Or most games? Not true. Most of these conflicts occur against human "psychopaths" who can somehow withstand hundreds of bullets, which is many, many more than any zombie you encounter. Plus Frank never needs to go to the toilet and like days are really short nowehere near 24 hours long. The story ends up trying to be a social commentary on our American lifestyle Are the zombies fat? They are stupid but are they stupid enough?. Do the zombies know their geography? Are they homophobic and racist? Do they all end up going to the prom and being prom queen? Are they whiney and loud. Are the female zombies easy? [that's enough...

Comment on a PC whinge blog on a post about PC gaming and how EPIC games (the company) left it's nice smart, flat-chested girlfriend (the PC) for an attractive big chested slut (consoles). If this taken out of context, context isn't cringe-worthy enough: "… and she has a drawer full of the most variegated toys and an active imagination concerning how to use them. This explains why, when slagging off on the ex, from time to time the new Console Elite’s pupils will dilate, his gait will devolve to something between a stagger and a waddle, and he will start muttering something about “configuration problems landing me in A&R a few times." Dude. It's a PC. Make some graphs and leaflets if you need to but keep your trousers on whilst you do. Oh and stop watching Battlestar Galactica. In other news: TGAM's Top 10 PC games 2008: 1) The Sims 2. Dual heritage edition. 2) The adventures of super person in super land, where everyone else is entitled to and has the sam...

Anyone (unlike us) with their finger on the pulse on video games these days might be excited with all the buzz around what the future holds for next--next gen. There's a new DS (no GBA slot!?), updates for the 360 and a host of expensive clip ons and add ons for the Wii. RUmours are also abound that Little Big Planet and Home might, you know, get released. You may be excited but were certainly aren't. What happened to last and this gen? The PS2 and the GBA, two fine formats still found in many many houses have been all but ditched commercially. Try it. Go to your nearest game shop and try to find some of the classics for these two formats. You probably won't find anything at all. If you are lucky you might find a copy of Okami or a battered copy of Pokemon Emerald in amongst the shovelware shit that Ubisoft insists on churning out for the all but abandoned platforms. And what for this gen? The choice for each platform is still hugely underwhelming, each consoles has a ...

Dear Chandra, or whoever. I won't say I'm a fan of ONM but I am a regular buyer as the free gifts are sometimes good and you do get the lowdown on games that your Future Publishing colleagues gloss over because they have real games to review like GTA and Dead Rising. In addition I have been diagnosed with the deliberating ( UPDATE: I totally meant deliberating and not debillitating ) condition GFP (Gay for Pokemon). Sadly this means that I often pick up a copy of your magazine. Monthly your magazine offends me. You seem to be stuck in a 1990s time warp where you OMG! in the magazine when you get a female member of staff and you think that comments about your hair and staff member's real lives are of interest to the reader. Frankly I don't care if Chris or Martin or some other office monkey is looking after a new born baby. Furthermore you really have to stop making captions about curries every time you use a screenshot with fire coming out of a characters mouth or anus....

If you are as nerdy as me, you have no doubt gone about the web and read a plethora of girl gamer blogs, sites that have four posts on them, (most of which are copy and paste Etsy rummages from the excellent Wonderland) the latest post is about four months old, the comments boxes are largely empty and the only thought out article is one about “There are no strong female characters in video games”. Today I’ll be arguing that this is a bogus statement. This argument isn’t new but the release of Super Princess Peach prompted a revival in the “computer games femmes are often portrayed as weak argument” by male and female gamers alike. Now it seems that any female gamer wanting to say something on the internets has to have written something like this in order to demonstrate that they really care or have something of worth to say about it. Personally, given the choice I will play as a female character most of the time. They tend to be more interesting and less generic than male chara...

My favourite anime show is Disney's Dinosaur . Although only one extended episode was ever made it still remains my favourite anime show ever! People often describe it as retarded and they slag it off in the anime forums saying that even the 41st episode of Naruto (the episode that everyone knows is at best non-canon, second series Pokemon good but nowhere near as good as 4th episode Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Finnish dub)is twenty times better. But what do they know? Disney's dinosaur has some great animation and the storyline is compelling. Also no-one unexpectedly flies or discovers that they can blow things up using their Triante birth right. Anyway the only reason it is on this blog, which is a videogame blog, not some kind of anime wank palace is that there is a game based on Disney's Dinosaur coming out soon. Here is a screenie. How good does that look? It's a WoW beater anyday. I just hope that they don't ruin it by giving it ...