That guy's a Maniac...

If you live in or have traveled through London you will have no doubt encountered discarded newspapers on tubes, in the street and in lunch and common rooms across the capital. If you are lucky you might find yourself with the Evening Standard or the Metro to help lunch/train/bus journeys fly by a bit quicker. If you are unlucky it will be City A.M . a boring newspaper about the city and stocks and graphs and FTSEs. However, recently I've not minded flicking through City A.M if only to follow the slip slide of GAME group into liquidation (possibly). In today's City A.M some goon from GAME group was blaming the lack of a new console cycle as a cause of their poor success. Okay, so I know very little about economics and markets and stocks and shares but I'm going to go out on a limb to say that it is pretty retarded to rely on the console cycles in order for the business to stay afloat. In the same week that sales of the Wii have topped 30 million across Europe you'd

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is out very very soon. It'll no doubt sell well, there may be news stories about how many millions of pounds people shirking their day at work to play it will cost the economy. We however, could not care about one of gaming's biggest annual events. Way back when, we were fans of Call of Duty, Brothers in Arms and Medal of Honour. The historical focus appealed to us. This was when FPS still worked off the Doom format. There was shooting to be done, "keycards" to be found, missions to be completed and if that wasn't enough the couch co-op wasn't too bad. Things changed with this: Showing its' age now, astonishing how much things have changed since 2002. I remember the first time I played through this, my mind was blown. It was unlike any experience I had in gaming before, incredibly exciting and powerful especially given the basis of this level on real events of the D-day landing. On a second and third playthrough however, it i

Pokemon Black and White are out and will undoubtedly top various sales charts. A common complaint about the game is that throughout all the various different versions since 1996 the game hasn't really changed that much. This is largely true, the 400 games since then have only added to and refined the original ideas. So how does the fifth generation fare? Well here's a list. 1) Not broken but fixed anyway. The last three generations and their various sister and companion games have been very fickle when it comes to features. The love/hate competitions, where you pit your pokemon in dancing and dressing up competitions appeared in ruby/sapphire, disappeared for fire red/leaf green came back in Pearl/Diamond and then vanished from Soul Silver/Heart Gold for example. Other features that were good but were cut were the vs. seeker, the pokewalker, the poke radar and most recently your lead pokemon no longer follows you around. Which is a shame. Not only was it nice to have your c

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

We are now up to killing these guys. For those of you who have played it you would know that that is not very far. Some people interpret these guys to be "Teh Blacks". Because they are um black? But they have horns and big pointy teeth. To be honest I'm not too happy about genociding them. Two of them were talking to each other just over a tree topped bluff whilst my guys were clearing rocks out of the way to start the genocide. Touchingly, the two chaps were talking about wood, crowns (maybe me?) and each other. I was struck by a pang of guilt as my inept force mowed them down in bloodless violence. One of my guards stood on the head of one and hacked at it with a sword in the face. It turned into a sweet. The horn of another one was harvested for the town coffers. Elsewhere about the town two citizens and two of my guards got married. Both instantly received a delivery of a new born child, one of which saw active service in the genocide mentioned above about four secon

Recently, we were commissioned to review the impossibly cute Wiiware, My Pokemon Ranch. Needless to say, we jumped at the opportunity but we ended up with a couple of gigs worth of extra images that we sadly couldn't use so here's the b-roll. This is the official longest serving Pokemon, my starter on Sapphire. That was [Checks wikipedia and sighs] 'a number' of years ago now. This guy saw service in Sapphire, Fire Red, Colosseum and extensive duties in Diamond. Also saw action and one of the few mon not to perform abysmally in the Epic Clash . Needless to say he's earned the break on the farm. Yes, it is actually he of comic fame . Let's not pay too much attention it goes to his head. A shiny Crobat. I wonder why this image wasn't used? I played ten hours of Pokemon Channel and I all I got was this lousy Jirachi. Also, an early contender for the gayest screenshot of the year? I played 30 hours of Pokemon Colosseum and all I got was this lousy Ho-oh? The Ar

A bunch of people at the office were circulating the latest link for the latest masterpiece by Kotaku's Brian Crecente: Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance . The usual jokes were flying around about how "Editor-In-Chief" means something different in America, and discussion arose as to when exactly Kotaku became (or desired to become) a science fiction pastiche of the real games industry. Deeply moved by the latest travesty from Kotaku Towers, I decided to get in touch with the big C for some constructive criticism. Here's how it went: TGAM: Hey. Just read your post about motion control in gaming. Thought I'd drop you a line to let you know it is one of the worst pieces of HTML pretending to be writing on Kotaku (FYI this is akin to saying it is one of the worst pieces of writing on the internet). Next time leave it to Leigh Alexander or someone else who can write their way out of a paper bag. It couldn't be more high school even if it ment

Yet again the technology companies are pushing the technology that we didn't want or even ask for. PSPGo has been creating some headlines with some rolling their eyes and others heralding the dawn of the package-less game. Like they did with mobile games. And all those other times. If you are anything like us, you have some severe reservations about it all. One of them being that the average person who plays games doesn't buy games mags, they don't even know about metacritic , they probably don't follow gaming blogs, the still go to the high street to buy their games and they probably haven't even taken their console online and if they have they probably have not downloaded any games let alone check the new releases every week. This is the average gamer. These are the people that saw the Wii soar to the heady heights. This is not your average forum lurker. This is not your average office of game journos. This is why many many great games perform underwhelmin