That guy's a Maniac...

You know, its not often I talk about the games industry and the depravity and filth within, however today I would like to bend your ears, open your eyes and perhaps even educate the cretins and executives out there. For the non-industryer "crunch time" is when a game, DLC or whatever is reaching it's deadline. This deadline will suddenly make everyone involved on that project start working at 200% (usually up from 50%) to get everything done, creating a great deal of stress on budgets, quality and people. The deadline itself is usually enforced by marketing, or by a separate publisher, who has dictated that, "this needs to happen by then". Now, why does this exist? In short, this exist because of poor project planning. The tl;dr version is: Persons are placed in positions of authority and management, due to internal promotions i.e. low ranking programmers, developers and even testers who get given these tasks, without professional qualifications or certifi

We picked this up from father of MUDs (or another appropriate title), Richard Bartle: When role-playing games offer the possibility for player characters to romance non-player characters, the pressure for including same-sex relationships doesn't come primarily from gay players. Rather, it comes from straight male players who are playing female characters and get creeped out when they get hit on by male non-player characters. Now he's a man who would know but I'm going to call Bouffalantshit on this one especially as it isn't qualified at all. is this an assumption or assertion? Are we talking about existing games, theoretical games or the two or three games that virtual world scholars study? Has anyone talked tot he developers who make this decisions and asked why they do/don't allow same sex relationships? Or at least I'm hoping it is all codswallop. Far too much has been written about gender and identity in games but for our liking none of it has re

Remember when we promised content ? Here's some of it. About four years ago we played Rise of Nightmares on the Kinect and on the Xbox 360. We weren't impressed with the Kinect line-up at launch  (still aren't to be honest or happy about subsequent Kinect games) it was a rushed gimmicky effort to try to sway some of the bajillions of people who had played Wii Sports into buying an Xbox 360 and then, presumably get them onto proper games or something. Although games seem to be a low priority for Sony and Microsoft who seem to be fighting to be the all-in-one home media centre of which games is a small part. Then, it turns out that everyone and their dog is doing cool things with a Kinect. Everyone except people who make Kinect games that is.  That would have been absolutely fine an' all except the Kinect games were all a bit pap. Including Rise of Nightmares . Under no circumstances should you play Rise of Nightmares single player. It is an exercise in extreme

Content. That's right kiddywinks, from the same team that brought you all of this , expect to see some content just above here sometime soon.  Every year, without fail we fail to celebrate the passing of another year of TGAM. Well we've got 10 more days to remember to do something. Will we remember to celebrate a whole six years of gaming related drivel? Or will we, as is tradition, just stop blogging for that whole week? OH, IT'S SO EXCITING and the only way you can find out what happens in this exclusive, nay, WORLD exclusive event is to just stay on this page F5ing. Well not this specific page but the main home page www.thatguys.co.uk Unless you are already on the main page, in which case carry on. Mac users can join in the fun too by stroking their iComputer every ten seconds I think that's how it works. The countdown begins here: Richie can you insert a countdown thingy here by Monday? Thanks. Oh and if you don't get around to it can you make sure t

It hasn't happened yet but we remember distinctly being distinctly worried in a very distinct fashion around the time that gaming really took off as there were rumblings of in-game advertising being explored as a thing. We were worried that if advertisers got the keys to our games, they'd end up looking as gaudy as real cities and we'd find ourselves strangely drawn to brands we'd never paid much attention to before. Fortunately, that never really happened. Red Bull got into a couple of games, Wipeout and Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death . The brand seamlessly sat in the world of Wipeout . Not so much Judge Dredd . From what I can recall instead of making your way around generic docks and warehouses filled with normal crates, you made your way around docks and warehouses filled with Red Bull crates. Other than that I can't recall other adverts for real world brands in games ( Mario Kart has in game billboards, hilariously advertising "green shells" and

Last time we were all gushy over five Wii games that have re-ignited our passion for games. Today we pick up that blog post, flip her over only to see the puss filled and warty fissures caused by the ingrowing hairs that is average Wiiware games. Just in case you've been a fanboy of other formats up until this second, Wiiware is the Nintendo Wii's downloadable game service. It is a real mixed bag. There are gems and they are the likes of Lit, Maboshi's Arcade, Jet Rockett, Final Fantasy: Subtitle subtitle, Nyx's Quest, Sword and Soldiers, Lost Winds 1 and 2, World of Goo, Art of Balance ... wow now that we start to list them there's quite a few good 'uns and many that put bigger box release games to shame. TO SHAME WITH YOU.  The problem in the past has been that Nintendo (Europe at least) has been fickle in the extreme. The ficklest in fact with allowing players to try Wiiware demos before they buy. Sometimes NoE releasing a dribble of Wiiware demos. S

We bought BIT.TRIP Complete when it came out and we've voluntarily relegated ourselves to the naughty step for not telling the TGAM Massive all about it.  For those of you unawares, BIT.TRIP was a series of six Wiiware, PC and devices-beginning-with-a-little-i games that came out from 2009 until 2011. They got good reviews but we weren't tempted to take the gamble. Plus, downloading new Wiiware is preluded by an hour long mini game called "Try to micro manage the selection of Wii games and channels you want with the tiny amount of space the Wii hardrive has" which is not intuitive, slow as fuck and all-round frustrating. However, the gods of gaming have smiled upon us by using divine intervention to convince the publishers of BIT.TRIP to release all six games and a soundtrack as a boxed Wii game. It will never sell huge amounts. Despite being multi-platform the brand is not well known and you'd be hard pressed to know what the games are about from the box