Ummm

This rather creepy, Something Awful did a generic gamer guy skit:



It is worrying how similar this is to myself and Cunzy, putting the OTT homoeroticism to one side of course.

Hearty Masculine Handshake,

Richie

Last post about this... Maybe

I dunno how may times I have mentioned this before... but, for those of you don't know, Rez on the PS2 came with a USB vibrating attachment. It was designed to "enhance" the gameplay of Rez, and not originally in a sexual way, apparently it was designed to create a synaesthesic experience... so that you could feel the music in your elbow or something.

Well anyway, with The new HD Rez game coming out on the 360 The question on everyone's lips is whether they can get-off in HD? Well... the answer is yes... Up to 3 joypads can be used as Trance vibrators! This can mean only one thing! Bluetooth vibrators, are round the corner!

Special Hugs,

Richie XXX

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3

See that blog title? That's what you can expect from TGAM: cliched post titles. That and tits. Anyway, today I am proud to bring you an interview with someone who properly works in the Games Industry, unlike us scrotes who sit on the periphery. Below is an interview with a lady who has had years of experience in games testing and went on to set up her own games testing company, which, is widely regarded as one of the best QA Testing companies around and doesn't let schlep pass through the door and out the other side unlike other companies. She has chosen the synonym Jill Valentine for this interview which, sure is nice for us because it's like Jill was actually here.

C11: Hello, Jill, welcome to TGAM.
JV: Hello. I'd like to say it's nice to be here but....

C11: Isn't games testing just an opportunity to get paid for playing games?
JV: Yes and no. Do you remember some of the ridiculous time limit challenges in the original Goldeneye that you had to complete to unlock cheats and other bonus stuff? You ended up memorising the whole level and would force a restart if you got stuck on a corner for that extra key second. Well, imagine playing one of those levels of Goldeneye over and over and over again. Using every possible weapon/object and standing in every nook and cranny and seeing if you could break the game. You have to speed run levels to test the spawning and scripting and you also have to play as slow as possible. And everything in between. Most games testers can't stand to play the games they've tested again because they're sick of it. If games were films, test audiences would have to sit through films sped up, slowed down, in every other language for days on end. That analogy was quite poor actually. Games testing is nothing like film screening to a test audience. Another key difference is that if a test audience hates the ending it will be changed. If games testers hate a game story it'll pretty much remain unchanged, be hated by reviewers and then hated by the great unwashed.

C11: So, here at TGAM we blame a lot of the shortcomings in games on poor play testing. Is it fair to say that titles with game breaking glitches is just down to shoddy play testing?
JV: More often than not it is purely down to time constraints, it's all very bureaucratic in the QA industry. Everybody wants to put pressure on someone else, marketers, publishers, developers and the further up the food chain you go the less they know about the game. All they have is a spreadsheet with numbers demanding that Title X be out in time for the Xmas rush regardless of quality. Expect to see a lot more of this in the near future as more and more publishers are merging.

C11: How much creative input do testers have? If a poor clone game comes in for testing, is it encouraged for testers to point out that this is a bit of game X and some of game Y but not as good as either?
JV: That's tough but a good point to raise. When I started working as a tester it was really dependent on dev cycles. Some companies have been through developer hell and their game is two years overdue, half the staff have jumped ship and they put it through testing almost as a formality. It's shipping anyway, the release date has been set by the publishers and there's no time to fix the bugs that testers find. It was partly this factor, which led me to set up my own company. So now when we get a game in I encourage the testers to put in any feedback they think necessary. So, like in your example, we've fed back to developers saying "Look your game is the lovechild of a poor man's GTA and a last gen Poker game. And it's worse than either of those games". After the initial shock, they often come round and in one case some of the Lead Tester got to go back to the drawing board with the developers and ended up feeding directly into the structure of the game. Ideally, all the games we get to test would be like that. More often than not though we're told in no uncertain terms that Game X will be on the shelves by Date X.

C11: So how is it that games like Top Trumps Dogs n Dinosaurs ever get released?
JV: There's no need for play testing for a game to be released. There is a relationship between how smoothly a game plays and how well it is picked up at retail but if publishers think they can knock up a cheapo horrible game and con enough people to buy it to make a profit, they'll go with it. Testers will grudgingly make sure it plays on your machine and has a title screen and you can save games and whatnot.

C11: The enigmatic confused granny?
JV: Precisely, you can all whinge on and on about it on your precious blogs and forums, but at the end of the day, if Ubisoft, or whoever, were losing money on all those film tie-ins and pet simulator games you wouldn't see new ones on the shelf quarter in and quarter out.

C11: So if we want to stop the dross we've got to target Grannies who think their Grandchildren would like Petz 4: Frogs and Stick insects?
JV: Ha. Yes. Target the Grannies. Perhaps you should set up some evening classes to inform them all about the evil of the £5 game.

C11: Is becoming a games tester a good way to break into the games industry proper?
JV: Testers are the front line of the industry, without QA the industry would collapse. And yes, it's a good way to break in the same way that playing a character in the Bill is a good way to break into Hollywood. That's a no. The answer is no. The people who make games are some of the most highly qualified personnel in some pretty obscure areas, as yet there is no real formal route into making games but this is slowly shifting. Formerly, it was the bedroom programmers of the 70s and 80s who ended up as the CEOs of games developers and publishers. More recently it has been the rising talent picked up by those bedroom programmers but now that there are degree programs and such it's harder for those truly creative talents to stand out on their own unless they happen to go into formal games degree programs. Having said that though, there are many testers who I have known who have ended up in the games industry proper but it's merely because whilst they were testing to earn a wage, they were otherwise knocking up builds and demos and mods for a folio in their own free time. It's purely because most game testers have an interest in video games that they do testing but to break into the industry (in the UK at least) you gotta have more than a deviant art page and work experience testing games. But I will say that your chances of 'breaking' into the games industry because you spent 10 years as a tester or lead tester are slim to none.

C11: So testers are the unsung heroes of the "Gaming industry"?
JV: Yes and no. I mean, let`s make it clear individual playtesters are disposable but they can make a great game flawless and a good game "polished" but they can only make a bad game work.

C11: So how come we don`t see "Playtester of the year award" at any one of the 1456 gaming awards ceremonies?
JV: Yes. The awards. More award ceremonies than any other media. None of which are good and all of which seem to be less than above board.

C11: Yeah GRAW-gate and that recent strategy award rubbish. At least there``s an Oscar for making credits on films.
JV: Really?

C11: Yeah some old woman won a lifetime achievement award for doing credit rolls. Everyone was like "Yep. Woman knows how to do credits".
JV: Wow. Maybe there should be an bug-hunter BAFTA or something.

C11: What about the NAVIGaTR awards? Should the UK have such an institution?

JV: Have you seen their award shows? No. No definitely not.

C11: Okay what's the latest games you've been working on and what's the ending?
JV: Well, normally I'd be breaking all kinds of agreements by telling you any of this but since you asked nicely, we're working on Horsez 2: Heavy Petting and the latest Sponge Bob GBA tie-in game.

C11: I don't believe you but thanks for spending the time. Did you know you are only the second real person to be interviewed by TGAM?
JV: It's a pleasure and thank you for your semi-compliment.

For your Mrs.

Well she's got to do something whilst you amass over 25000 gamerpoints....

Musing on Music

Video Game Music. The music of video games. Some of it is epic, some of it is very evocative and some of it is nausiating in the extreme. There are a lot of very active video game music "rearrangers", remixers and performers from the grand Video Games Lives concert, hit and miss OCremix, very raw soundclick to TGAM favourite Diversion (check the show every Thursday).

From the weaboist of obscure JRPG music to the new tunes of Portal a vast swathe of it is shit. It is, don't pretend otherwise. Do you remember in the 90s where every game had an American "ROCK" soundtrack? Instantly forgotten by the next loading screen.
And if video game music is mostly bad the remixes are even worse. The world does not need tinny electric guitar "rock" versions of the three notes in the chorus of the Hyrulian Field theme. There also seems to be a race to remix the dullest least memorable theme from the most obscure Japanese RPG. For god's sake just remix One Winged Angel, get it out of your system and move on fanboy.

What the world does need is more Tetris remixes. There are already a gazillion and they are all great. I have listened to most of them, happy hard core, flute versions, jumpstyle, techno, trance and combinations of all of those styles are available to the discerning listener. I have consumed them all but I am hungry for more.
Yesterday on a routine sweep of the internet for Tetris remixes I discovered the greatest version yet. This is a big claim, perhaps the biggest claim I ever made, perhaps this is my purpose, my destiny. This is why I was put here to find the greatest rearrangment of an old game. I don't know how it can be bettered though. Destiny fulfilled methinks!

So here it is, Tetris by DaCaV found over at Soundclick.

Click this to listen dacav+tetrisbydacav5.mp3

REVIEW It is great because it combines the music of Tetris with words! Some of those words are bottom and D-Cups. It also doesn't bother with trying to combine the Music A and Music B themes which others do. Don't get me wrong I like the B Music but the A music can stand on it's own two feet. C Music can fuck off. This song is also great because the lyrics talk about 'connecting like Tetris' the song then goes on about boobs and bums bouncing which this author wants from her Tetris remixes. 9.5/10

War of the Servers

You may have heard of a machinima called War of the Servers already. If not watch it now! That's an order private! Here's the trailer:

It's good machinima it has a classic plot retold and revamped, it's beautifully shot, plenty of action a splash of drama, there are in-jokes,,cameos. It really is great, the score even. If you have never liked or even watched machinima then give this one a go. It's all on Youtube, some meaty 7 episodes and over an hour of material. Watch it! Watch it! Watch it! You won't be sorry.

http://www.waroftheservers.com/

"Kind of like Blue Screen Of Death without the cringeyness mixed with Red vs. Blue without the boredom of all the bopping men" Four Stars, Cunzy1 1 TGAM

Put that on the DVD box Stoneman you mentalist

It is like the desert

Yeah it's like the desert! I'm sad at not being part of what we could now call 'this gen' and I think that all the players have had an ample chance to win my, an avid gamer's, attention. I have been singly just utterly unimpressed by the PS3 post launch (we all know about pre-launch). Zelda, Wii Play and a dodgy not even tested fake online mode just don't justify spending that much ££££. Sorry guys you've had a while to get me onside but not convinced. Which means..... FTW.

Why you say? Well it's actually online like the Dreamcast and the DS, it's got flagship next gen games that really do impress me, it's fun, I can play Gears or War, all the Dooms, no more wires, Dead Rising, the remaining members of Catch the Monkey B69 are always online, Dino Crisis 3, Bioshock, Oh and I absolutely love the achievements lists and the viral achievements (the six degree achievements where you get an award for playing someone who has played against bods from the developing team).

Downsides: They've had a long time to do a lot and one could argue that they haven't, currently 2 games released that I would want to play, really fucking expensive set up when you throw in Live subscription, wireless controllersx2 charge and play kits and headsets.

PROJECT GET CUNZY1 1 An Xbox 360 STARTS TODAY. Xbox 360 fund= £3

So this is what we call a heart warming family reunion

Hey kids it's time for a triforce-esque update from me and some of the things I've been up to:

1) This weekend was That Guy's A Maniac Mini-Con 2007! Following the success of TGAM Con and TGAM con 2 son of TGAM Con and TGAM Con 2 was a great success. I finally busted the dirty sequel to TGAM's 2006 Game of the Year, Timesplitters Future Perfect, accidentally. It started by me showing Chuff_72 and Quadbee how hard the last four challenges were to get a gold on. I ended up getting two platinums and two golds so that's another game 100%ed! Many games were played, by many I mean mostly three: Quake 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Dinotopia: Something About Suntone Pirates. Quake 2 was probably king and we managed to get a hall of fame all star line up for some Quakage, the likes of which have not been seen for some years- Quadbee, Chuff_72, Robisgay and Cunzy1 1. We also got to the last level of FFCC.

Dinotopia Sunstone Pirates is a pretty awful game but I got quite far by imagining the main character had white hair. That way he looks like Dante and not like Frodo sodding Baggins.THAT WAY IT WAS ALMOST LIKE A DEVIL MAY CRY GAME WITH DINOSAURS IN IT ON THE GBA. Which, for a long time has been a favourite wet dream of mine.

2)Inspired by Devil May Dinotopia at TGAM Mini Con 2007, I finally beat Devil May Cry 3 on Normal mode. It turns out I just had to try a bit rather than turning it on periodically and trying to beat Dante without really remembering the controls. Who'd a thunk it?

3) I went to a conference about Second Life but I didn't mention to anyone that it was full of perverts who need more than emoticons from their chat programs. No one did a talk about it's uses for children touchers either which was disappointing to say the least.

4) I drank a lot of alcohol, for a long time but it was one of those "drink forever and not get drunk" times and I'm one of those people who is happy to admit that I drink to get drunk. Why do people always say that they don't drink to get drunk? Do you like the taste of beer really? Really? Or do you just like to spend a lot of money on drinks for fun.

5) Played a bit of Super Smash Brothers with Quadbee. Fox and Falco are officially cunts. Seriously.

6) Played and pretty much busted Pokemon Channel. It is the greatest game of all time. Essentially you sit and watch TV with Pikachu but in a game. That is it really. I've decided that it is TGAM's Game of the Year 2007 despite the fact that it wasn't released in 2007 and that the Gamecube was dead in 2007. I'm going to write a lengthy EDGE style wankfest where I compare Pikachu to Faust and Guy Fawkes and then ramble on about Gibson. It is going to start like this "the sounds of hot man syrup pit-a-patting on the floor increased until it was an inexorable continuous sound as the Nintendo logo filled the screen and the enigmatic shriek of 'Pikachu' resonated around my already wet ear lobe".

7) I bought a copy of EDGE to practice my ritin for my End of Year game of the year review. May's issue has a fine example of how to write a seven page long piece of crap. Check out the "Play pen" article. It's too EDGE for even EDGE. Firstly it's about writing in games (snoooooze+10 wankery points), secondly it's seven pages long (+25 wankery points) and the whole thing is practically unreadable unless you are the kind of person who thinks that they actually enjoy Second Life for reasons other than sexing with other men pretending to be women (+100 wankery points). Extra wankery points are awarded for the over use of the words cinematic, medium, dialect and incongruous. The reader's letters are pretty awful too, they're trying too hard to get a job by writing wankery. The last letter ends "How many more adults would play Metal Gear Solid if it really was an Oedipal tragedy?". Come on, I'm not even lying either but the answer is "Significantly less people should think that they should write to EDGE whilst watching themselves 'fluff the pillow' in their mirror after taking a heavy dose of wank pills".

Cunzy out

Mission-Get-The-Anime-Post-Off-The-Front-Page Part 2

So after something that happened on not the world's second greatest videogames blog, this not the world's second greatest videogames blog was set up. It's called guilded lilies and it's for women gamers and men gamers who might want to talk to women gamers and it's all about women and games. There is a forum and everything but it has to be stopped.


This list explains why:


1) Their logo looks like one of these (!). That's a full stop not some kind of mole
2) The last bunch of people who got together to start a forum for women gamers ended up doing this:

They blew up the frickin deathstar by employing their man robots. Stop the rebels! Save the Empire, queue the music

Buh, buh, buh, ber, be der de de der. Der der der der de-der de de-deh. DEH, duh, DEH, duh der-rud-der-dud der der der de-rud-der-dud der der dum der der...........

GoW Death Threats Spark Call For Help?*

Creator of the original Playstation, Chuff_72 has called for Dr Wo 69 to "give him a hand".

This follows a number of actual frags caused by Marine34 which has forced Chuff to hide behind one of the sofas on the first floor of the Mansion map.

Chuff_72 was called a "Pokeyman" on Gears of War by Marine34 late last night on a round in The Mansion level in online multiplayer. Chuff_72 is now refusing to leave his hiding place behind a sofa on the first floor. "I'm afraid to leave cover. In the chat in the menu screen he was pretty adamant that he was going to 'smoke me and then hump my corpse' he has done it to me before on other levels" Chuff said from his cover earlier today.
He has called for Dr Wo 69 to "Get upstairs and cover me".

Whilst fighting in Gears of War is common Chuff is convinced that Marine34 is stalking him because he repeatedly tagged Marine 34 with smoke grenades which in competitive play is seen by some players as a bit off or overly cheeky.

"I have cancelled all of our team plans. I am afraid to leave my sofa, I will never feel the same. I will never be the same," he said over Xbox headsets.

Dr Wo 69, real life Dr and sometimes Maniac was unavailable for comment. It is thought that he is "outside somewhere in the ruins".

*In all seriousness, the 'sexual harassment panda' seems to be back in the blogosphere (....ugh) again, see the post title link. Now what happens in the blogosphere concerns me little but in gaming it is pretty horrible. From my own experience it seems to be Americans (who seem to appear on XBLive at about 2am in the morning) that are the worst. They sound like mutant girls and are just downright offensive to some of the female maniacs but embarassingly so. One moron said "If you wuz a pokeyman you'd be a Lickitung" and then continued the audible-only-to-dogs tirade. The fact that he couldn't play for shit didn't seem to matter either, like the proverbial pig, he was happy in his shit. There was a fantastic report done by someone who played advertising that they were female in a serious of MMORPGs and Online FPS. It's just nasty. Unfortunately, I lost the link. The problem is there is no beating them. They like to be ignored and they love to be responded to but there is no fighting irrational thought. The best way is to play them out of the game. They get bored of watching the game after getting taken out so often that they log off. Of course this doesn't help newbies or people playing on their own but sometimes it helps to just turn off the headset or join another game. The fact that you shouldn't have to is a different matter. I don't see how this issue is going to get fixed either, protests, silences and naming and shaming don't help. Perhaps some kind of in game enforcement would be good. Rather than banning just an automated avatar that hunts and wipes out any griefers. Sin Bins have kind of worked in Second Life and other MMORPGs. But when we are talking about thousands of different games and millions of players that does start to get tricky.

Zucht....

Yesterday, Long Time TGAM Commentor and occassional guest writer Chuff_72
said:
"OH SIIIICCCKKKKKKK someone on this blog is planning on getting ALL the games with dinos in... try and guess who everybody. Anyways, that means he/she is gonna have to buy Splashdown 2! There's even a dino on the back of the frikin box! SIIICCCKKKKKKK!!!!"

and

"SSSSIIIIIIICCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! I forgot John Woo Presents Stranglehold, not only dinos but in a FRIKIN MUSEUM!!!!! Another reason to get a 360...Homophobe for dinosaurs."

It's true readers. I'm giving up on trying to collect all the games I would like in my games collection. The sad truth is I just don't have time to play them all and I know that one day soon I'm going to lose a cable, lead or accessory which means some of my old consoles are going to have to be put down. For good. Nothing but museum pieces.

Until then I'm going to try to get every game that has featured dinosaurs (real dinosaurs, sorry Yoshi, Bub & Bob) and then beat that game. As Chuff_72 rightly points out though there are stacks of games that feature dinosaurs and some of them are near impossible to get anymore. Jurassic Park III DNA Factor anyone?. In fact I'm not sure half of them were ever on general release. They certainly weren't in game.

Anyway, Chuff_72 was right about both Stranglehold and Splashdown 2. Thanks to IGN for this picture

Maybe I was wrong about you IGN? Anyway Stranglehold looking sexy on the left here.

Splashdown, something something looking a bit PS3 on the left here, from the wonderful Gamespot.

I can see this is going to be a very expensive endeavour...........

What about you reader? Do you want to completely over-obsess about something in games? You might as well because there is nothing else out on the radar at the moment. Does anyone remember something about next-gen consoles? I heard that one of them was coming out soonish? Ohhh what about the DS? That used to be a good platform. Or the PSP? Is that still on sale near you?

Next Week on That Guy's a Maniac, World's Second Best Videogame Blog....

Richie "I'm a co-author" Posts about something other than non dinosaurs??? Could it be? Stay connected to find out.

Games as Art

At TGAM we don't care if anyone thinks of games as art or not. Do you remember the early 2000's when you couldn't move for the internets, mags and forums explaining are games art question? Endless touting of Ico or Rez as pure art. All the while in America there were loads of videogame-art exhibitions. Have you noticed how all the posts this year seem to be very nostalgic? Is it because with the exception of "Halo 3 not yet released" is the only news at the moment? Who can say. Anyway. TGAM, one time only, no more discussion; GAMES AS ART.

If we were pushed we could put Games under the umbrella of art but I wouldn't. Art and Art Galleries fall under my remit as part of my real work outside of Planet TGAM and if you want to associate Games with pretense, boredom, elitism, waste of time and evolutionary worthless then yes, Games are Art*.

All I know is that I'd rather watch final fantasy AMVs set to that song by Linkin Park endlessly than watch David Beckham sleeping, people shouting, a bowl of fruit decomposing or a naked woman slowly slide off her chair. I'd prefer to play Devil May Cry on Dante must Die difficulty than sit through a typical art lecture telling me that obscure foreign art made by an obscure artist during a boring period in history has revolutionised the way we live today. I'd prefer to watch reuns of GamesMaster or a documentary on why Devil Dice is turning American Teens into killers than watch some Oxbridge nonce with 20 silver spoons up his arse explore the 18th Century artwork in a grand mansion in Wiltshire. Of course you may like art but do you go around denouncing things as art? I'm a scientist by training but I don't denounce things as Science or not science.But I guess I'm busy whereas the thousands of work for food art historian graduates have nothing better to do than to convince the Guardian or museums that in fact Pong is the most significant work of art in the 21st Century.

Both gaming and art are marginalised and many people choose to leave both to do other things like get laid, buy houses, drive fast, die on a mountain or have kids. So there is a lot of common ground there. But there is potential. The problem is with a lot of game art is that, as my good friend Brother of ChunkySalsa says a lot of it is "one line art" i.e. it can be explained in one line. There's no deeper levels. Often it looks nice because it's digital. Members of the public say "ooooh", gamers says "i think the fourth level of the Thing would communicate this idea better" and art critics say "what a nice use of media but it's not really art". Game-art needs to either explore gaming or to provoke a viewer response.

Here's some one line game art people should do. Unemployed new media artists feel free to steal this ideas as long as you reference That Guy's a Maniac and as long as you do a sex roleplay with your partner where you call each other Cunzy1 1 and Richie:

1) Record someone playing through Final Fantasy VII to the end recording every single button press. They should then stick Playstation controller buttons to a wall in the sequence in which they were pressed. This piece of art would communicate the dynamic nature of player-controller interface albeit in a static way. It would also highlight how much fucking time gamers waste on a big game with a silly storyline.

2) Create a selection of pikups from Halo and leave them strewn around the gallery. People can pick them up and carry them but they have a timer. When the timer goes off gallery visitors have to drop them. This art highlights the concept of death and camping in FPS as well as highlighting our own mortality

3) Wall of death. An artist should get the online records for one of the squillions of online FPS. They should then construct a wall similar to the Vietnam Veteran's Wall and put all the tags up of people who were fragged. Gamers would come to see if their name was there and it would be controversial, which art galleries and critics love because it condones violence and equates real war with shooting games. Also, I would love to see Cunzy1 1 engraved onto a nice marble.

4) Something Awful Gallery. Someone should just rip all the hilarious videogame photoshop phridays by the genius goons something awful. This art would replace the usual elitism of art galleries with the elitism of the message boards and forums of the internets. The elitism of not knowing your game history.

5) Put Rez on a TV in a gallery and everytime someone says "Oh cool, Rez!" the building burns down instantly. This art explores the themes of combustion and going on and on and on about really average old games. Cough Resident Evil

6) Build the museum from Animal Crossing. That would work. Well Wired and boing boing would love it I guess.

If you are an out of work arts graduate and I suspect if you are an arts graduate you are unemployed and you want more ideas for lazy art based on videogames to get some exhibition together in a Local Authority Museum then give us a shout. We're full of shit ideas like this that you only wish you could of dreamt of that time your friend invited you to an art exhibition where you got to speak to the director for five minutes.

Cunzyed

*Dinosaur art is of course the greatest art ever and dinosaur games are art this is not up for debate