RAM RAIDER EXCLUSIVE! PC ZONE WALKOUT

Exclusive from the legendary RAM RAIDER! There has been a walkout at PC Zone magazine! A guy, a guy and some other guy and another guy have walked out leaving the Future Publishing magazine in potential jeopardy!

We asked our source in the heart of Future Publishing some questions surrounding the ordeal:

Us: So what is a "PC".
Our source: Umm it's like a machine for making books and graphs.
Us: Oh. Okay. So what was the magazine about?
Our secret source whose name shall never be revealed: It was about how to write good books and to make cool graphs and to print out labels for CDs and shit.
Us: Shit. And why the walkout at the magazine?
Our super spy inside the actual heart of the "enemy" in between the valves: I think someone accidentally printed out a graph on the wrong side of some glossy paper and someone called it the worst F*****g graph they ever saw.
Us: Damn man! So what is the future for the magazine?
Our source: Both readers of the magazine will be attending a quiet ceremony at Future Publishing Office in Bath. A ceremony OF THROWING FLAMING DEATH STARS*!!
Us: Thanks Graham Barlow former editor of MacFormat!
Graham Barlow: No worries Keith and Mike "writers" of popular games blog that has gone down hill ever since the first post!
Graham, Keith and Mike: Oh no!!!!.....


*Stars of Death not THE Death Star.

Heavy Rain the paper cut killer

There is hype abound fellow sailors. Hypery and balderdashery truth be told! It surrounds a game called Heavy Rain: The Metro killer. Many of you will have seen The Casting, a full motion video used to show the full body and facial motion capture techniques used to show the full range of emotions that most games still struggle to show. Emotions like "crying" and "angry crying" and "crying because you didn't put the bin out again".

Many of you may know that this game will be the next game from David "shagged a dead guy" Cage, the previous game was Fahrenheit and it involved a woman who shagged a dead guy. What The Casting and previous press releases fail to tell you about this new game is that there will not be any shagging of dead guys in this game. We phoned David Cage to ask him why this wasn't mentioned in any preview we saw and why would he make a game without necrophilia in it:

David: 02 5589, David Cage speaking.
TGAM: You bastard.
David: Hello?
TGAM: We know where you live "Dave"
David: Oh, not you guys again!
TGAM: Gay! [We hung up after that, TGAM 1-David Cage 0]

Richie: Hey we are the first blog to mention Heavy Rain and not use the words "Uncanny Valley"
Richie: Dammit...

Luv n hugs

Cunzy + 1

360 Miis

Over the weekend we had a hands on (this time) with the Xbox 360 Mii creator. Unlike Spore, the system is unbelievably flexible for avatar creation and this application is a great way to pretend you have a Wii without so much as spending a penny! We made this as our first avatar:



See how easy it is! Then we got creative and made this one:



Ha ha har! All our British Xbox friends are gonna laugh so hard when they see this on the 360 version of Home when it comes out (due out November 2009)! Unfortunately due to video games and television stunting our imagination we literally couldn't think of another avatar to make that wasn't already a videogame character. We tried to make mario but around the time we got to adding the tits the microsoft execs looked at us and shook their heads very slowly.

In summary then, this could be the tool to bring the Xbox 360 out of the stinky underground and to the masses. I'm not too sure how much we are allowed to say about another exciting development we saw whilst we were at Xbox HQ but I think we're okay to say "Xbox360-motion-sensing-Xmote". I can say that right? Well you read it here first. I can't wait for Halo Galaxy to come out! It is going to rawk!

Noogins and nooch!

Series of games that need to stop

With the recent """excitement""" around Megaman 9, thatguys would formally like to register a list of series that should just stop. In the alleged billion dollar game industry it is time to reallocate some of the money from employing people to 'make shit shiny' and 'copy what Halo did' to coming up with some new IP. That's right Nintendo, I'm looking at you!

Series that should have stopped a long time ago:

Megaman- Lets be fair, everyone since the first one has been the same. Come on Capcom.

Zelda- Ditto

Metroid- Yuh huh

Pokemon- Same

Halo- Lets just hope that three was the last remake of one.

Resident Evil- See above.

Tomb Raider- Should have left it after the first one.

C&C, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo- All four of these games haven't changed in over twenty seven years.

Every Mario game- If you have a SNES that still works there has been pretty much no reason to buy a new Nintendo console.

Fallout- Seriously. WTF.

Earthbound/Mother. Come on now.

9/11 Conspiracy Bush Obama Viagra Naked

Apologies for the brash and somewhat gratuitous Post title.

But we at Thatguys are very aware that our traffic has been increasing, as much as we would like to think there are actual people out there that think, "man these guys are informative ironic and funny". Deep down part of us knows that through pure persistence, much like a kid constantly screaming for attention from their mother, people are just coming back to us.

WTF people who are you? what do you do? do you like us? do you hate us? did you vote for bum in willy or willy in bum?

We wanna know... Tell us what you think... Take 2 seconds from your day, get off your high horse and leave a comment..

Love and hugs,

Richie X.

Breaking News!

In case you missed the TV-adverts, radio spots, advertorials, news features, interviews with Will Wright, selling out sponsorship on every gaming blog, magazine adverts and zeitgeist "Sporn" articles then you read it here first, Spore is out.

We have had an exclusive hands off playthrough with both the DS version and the lesser known PC version. You won't find another hands off exclusive like this anywhere else!

Spore Creatures for Nintendo DS.Many companies release fully fledged games for the proper consoles then release some half-arsed watered down version on the DS. All the publicity and the marketing for the proper versions means that many people buy the DS version on good faith only to find that it is a steaming pile of GBA shite. Spore Creatures for the DS is one of these games. Imagine, if you will, a watered down version of pokemon put through the Fossil League Dinosaur Tournament Championship filter and then whisked together lightly for twenty minutes with Drawn Together. That's what you get. It's awful and clearly has been quickly put together to generate some extra dollars off the back of the main game. We give it 4/10. Gamespot is too afraid to even review it in case they lose all the spore advertising money.

Spore the "Real one" for the Personal Computer.

Unlike the shoddy DS version (see above) the PC version is okay, the same way that the Sims was okay.
Hours 1-36 after opening. After tearing open the package and installing the game it slowly dawns on you that this is the future of gaming and within your very hands lies perhaps the greatest game of all time. Spore will silence all the critics of gaming and all your friends who laugh at your hobby will suddenly take an interest. You will be a guru to them! Hours 1-36 will be played straight in a row. The first day will be mostly creating creatures. Hours 24-36 will be spent evolving and managing your civilisations.
Hours 415-420 after opening. You probably won't have really played it since those first few crazy days as you felt a bit "game dirty" so you dedicated time to going out in the real world with your real friends in order to compensate. However, the time away from the game has given you some exciting ideas for creature creation. You load up the game and play it for five hours. It's alright but you can't quite do all the things you imagined in your head. You quickly look on GameFaqs for some kind of cheat that lets you dispense with the boring bits and log out when you get bored.
Some time in 2014.After a conversation about it in the pub you remember how great Spore was and load up the old game file. Within an hour you realise why you hate it. It's good in theory but exhausting and ultimately unsatisfying in the long run. You get bored and play 20 hours straight of Burnout 2 on the old PlayStation 2.
Later in 2014.Toy with the idea of deleting your save game during a file cleanup but realise that it will take you ages to get back to the point you got to 6 years ago on that first day.
2020. You get a virus on your computer and the Spore save files as well as all your photos from University are forever lost to the ether. 7/10.

So there you have it. Hands off exclusive from TGAM. Join us next time where we will be discussing our best dead maiden upskirt moments from Ninja games.

EDGE magazine still taking the piss!

Due to our important role as a barometer for games due for general release we get sent shit loads of stuff in the post. Games, consoles, merchandise, costumes and magazines. As a consequence we get sent a copy of EDGE magazine. It's not that we would buy it anyway but when you are on the crapper you need something to read that isn't Games TM.Not so long ago you may remember that popular digital culture magazine Electronic Dreams Games Enema (EDGE)published a rather piss poor article about Menu screens. At the time we came up with a list of other piss poor articles that lazy writers could put together but in a valiant show of defiance they went one better and this month's EDGE carries an extremely "interesting" article about booklets with games.


The little books you get with games. Honestly of all the topics ripe for an article about gaming. On top of that the editors seem to think it is a good idea to fill ever increasing chunks of the magazines with developer and career shit. Once again this month seems to focus on the North East. Again. Time to rerun the Scandanavian article again guys? Nobody reads it anyway.

This paucity of decent content indicates that they are really stuck for ideas over at EDGE during these harsh empty summer months when all the people who can make decent decisions are off on ironic holiday in Wales. Which is why we took 49 seconds out of our precious day to put together this helpful list for some ideas for future (ha ha) articles:

An article about the best font used in a game and the best colour combinations. Is white on blue the new black on beige?

An article about the little shapes on the spine of the Nintendo game boxes and what they mean. I know what they mean! I know!

An article about some of EDGE's previous worst articles from the Prey review to the overly glowing preview of Mirror's edge.

An article about why all "Official magazines" are a big pile of wank even though most of them are written by the same seven people at future publishing.

An article about the worst control systems ever with special mention for games that don't let you reconfigure buttons or invert the y-axis so we can't play FPSs like a flight simulator.

A behind the scenes article about how Future Publishing's Bath office is always empty.

An article about the last month's issue of EDGE with interviews with last month's writers and Kieron Gillen.

An article about memory card icons from the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 days.

An article about the 'notes' sections within game booklets.

A cutting article about the best Prima strategy guide.

A two part article about how Beyond Good and Evil was better than Ico and how Ico was better than Beyond Good and Evil even though both were better and worse and overhyped and underhyped and overappreciated yet underappreciated more and less than SODDING PSYCHONAUTS.

Once again guys, feel free to use any of these ideas whilst wondering why the magazine sales head ever closer to oblivion. Cheers drive!

Fan Service

Did you set up a website to discuss the hot topics in your lifestyle/hobby area of interactive gaming? Were you underwhelmed when nobody cared about what you had to say because the coverage on Kotaku was more even handed and up to date? If the answer to any of those questions is yes then fear not. You are a sad fanboy but by following our hot guide you'll have that template blog up and running again before you google your site url to see if anyone linked to you this week.

Step 1: Even if your site is really shit, get sponsored ads almost before you have any other content. This makes your content-lite website look professional and if you get any hits in the future you might generate an income! To add a further professional air get that advertising that highlights words throughout the blog. There's nothing less frustrating than boxes of text popping up every time the cursor accidentally floats over words like "here" or "price drop".

Step 2: After taking a step back you will probably realise that all your posts are about the Xbox 360! Whoops, no one is going to believe that you care about the other consoles out there! How do you broaden the appeal without giving up your ardent fanboy standpoint on issues around how microsoft can fight their way up to second place in the market despite having a three year head start? Easy, go multi-author. Four or five authors is best. To those who don't know any better it looks like you will have a diverse point of view on every topic. In reality, two of them probably won't contribute but they will comment making your site look much better. There's nothing worse than 0 comments all over the fucking place!! We should know!

Step 3: Create a forum! It's easy, you'll continually attract people who get kicked out of other forums and it adds yet another professional edge to your site. Before you know it the circle jerking will begin and for a sweet short while the reality that the console your mum bought you is shit will be a distant nightmare. What really impresses people is if you go to the effort of creating an image advertising your forum but put a deliberate spelling mistake in. The below example is from thatgamingsite another popular weblog about interactive video games.

Step 4: Coming up with games news is hard but stealing it is plain wrong. Instead the polite thing to do is steal news that is fourth or fifth hand. That way nobody cares that 6 out of 8 of your front page stories "stories" are just copied from the relevant Xbox sections of IGN, Kotaku or god forbid 1up.

Step 5: Name your blog something similar to the first or second greatest video games blog ever as proven by science that way you get to sail in the slipstream of their good name and get oodles of free publicity. Ideally, target someone who doesn't regularly google parts of their site name otherwise you'll end up in some kind of a blog war. And it's important for you to realise, that we've never lost.

Tomb Raider Underworld: Orderist

Watch the below trailer and join me in disgust!



Yes readers, Lara Croft, shooting tigers in the face! Right in the face. We here at TGAM would like to call for an official ban of this game in all territories and furthermore this is call to arms to all the bloggers who usually complain about games being racist and sizeist and all that shit that doesn't really matter. This DOES matter assholes.

As you all know, all tiger subspecies are Appendix I listed on CITES and listed as critically endangered and endangered on the IUCN red list. Yet here we have the positive role-model Lady Croft shooting a number of them in the face, in slow motion no less.

We and presumably every other gamer, does not want to promote the shooting of any endangered creatures in the face there are already plenty of other things to shoot in the face without sending out a message that flies in the face of environmental conservation ; Nazis, the Japanese, Aliens, Daemons, Spanish Zombies and African Zombies have sated our appetite in the past. As such until Eidos & Crystal Dynamics change the content of the game we will not play Resident Evil 3 or Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen in protest.

Imagine if it was Maddie Mcanns that Lara was hunting down, shooting her and her chums in the face because she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time! It is at least twice more outrageous than that. In fact they should change the tigers to big domestic cats, there are way too many of them anyway. And they are useless. That would be a much better eco-message, shoot domestic cats in the face now, in protest of real animals suffering virtual injustice. I just kicked one on the shoulder in protest and it felt good, like it was the right thing. Join us in our campaign readers and stop this injustice. Here is what our celebrity friends say on the issue and if they are on board you should be too because they have money and paps chasing them:

"What tigers now?"- United Kingdom Ambassador Gordon Brown

"I fucking hate tigers anyway. They are all the same I can't tell the difference between the subspecies"- Ed "Haunted Maze" Federmeyer

"God yeah it'th like tho dithguthting. Thith game thould be banned"- Working girl, Peaches "Geldof" Geldof

"Fuck you, fuck you and Ringo"- Animal rights campaigner and obligate vegetarian Heather "Mills" ""Mcartney""

"Kick a tabby today until Eidos see their wrong"- Graeme "Timesplitters and Killer Cuts" Norgate

Expect cutting edge and in perspective comment from WWF and internet celeb and whinge-for-hire "didn't play games until 2004" N'Gai Croal to post their outrage any second now! Expect some kind of Facebook protest within the next couple of days. Expect to see Boris Johnson uppercut a kitten on the news!

Help us stop this injustice. We emplore, nay! WE BEG YOU!

Cunzy"1" 1 & Richie "Rich" Riches

TGAM top 50 ultimate TGAM top games best list of best games of all time ever: Number 42

Hot on the heels of number 43 we have a new entry on the best list of best games of all times ever. The votes are in and have been counted and you have voted Tanks! from Wii Play as your 43rd bestest game of all time ever.

We are a big fan of Tanks! here which is why Tanks! has been voted as the 42nd greatest game of all time ever. Tanks! what a game. Yes. Tanks!. Did you know reader that Tanks8 from Wii Play is the first Wii game on this prestigious list? Well it is. Check it:

43: Ed Fedemeyer's Haunted Maze
44: Resident Evil "gay den"
45: Final Fantasy VIII
46: Resident Evil Genesis
47: Dino Crisis 3
48: Dead Rising
49: Resident Evil Confidential Report File 1
50: Biohazard 4D Executer

Coming next time: NUMBER 41

"That" gaming site

Oh I see...

That Gaming Site

Yet another TGAM RIP-off...

Should we be flattered?