I lost my friends to WAR.

Yeah, WAR. WAR is hell. What is it good for etc. All those cliches. Insert them all here! Well WAR is good for losing five friends. That's what it is good for.

A bunch of my staple geek friends all got themselves playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, through a combination of relationships ending, boredom and geographical distance. Now they play it. A lot.

(Un)fortunately, I am copied into all their emails so daily I get 145 emails which roughly broken down are: When we gonna meet up tonight, tomorrow, weekend (45%), what we did last night for those who couldn't make it (35%), hey guys I just read the wiki and we should.... (10%), microphone, PC, problems (10%). And dps jokes and all other acronyms which I couldn't care to google are the new order of the day. Just today I got sent this:

LOLLERCAUST you will all no doubt agree. But do I despair? Nah. It's how MMORPGs work and the mix of my friends who now play WAR is testament to the tried and tested formula of sucking people into the game and getting them to keep the sub fees flowing. Three are longtime on/off WoW players, one would have punched Wow in the balls and spat down his neck and the other one was always afraid he would get sucked into WoW so avoided it. Then BINGO! a new slightly different game comes along and the ex-wowers are back in, the wow hater claims it's very different and therefore okay and the scared ones' transition was made all the easier by personal circumstances and the peer pressure all coming together at once.

Since then it has been by the book cliche MMORPG experience. One of them "accidentally" forgot to have "eaten or anything yet today" at 6pm, a number of them are running alts and one shamelessly traversed London with a PC and a monitor just to play it because his new house didn't have a connection.

Am I upset? Nah! They sound like they are having a blast. As long as they remember to eat (you know who you are?). It's nice that a game can provide for a social experience and bypass that horrible feeling at the end of a good real world geekend whereby you have to pack up your junk and start to think about work the next day on the train home. Of course, the whole social aspect of MMORPGs is highly questionable as most conversations (microphone problems aside) in game tend to be about the game but it's better they are MMORPGing than on the streets. That shit is dangerous.

Am I jealous? Well, who is to say where I would be if I was single, had some frickin time, had a decent PC and internet connection. I'll not be so high and mighty to suggest I would be any different.

Nooch and good ganking guys.

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.

2 years old!

Yes can you believe it! That guy's a maniac is now two years old*!

*mentally, in maturity, socially and verbally.

Here are some Pics from our 2 year party:Chris was on Security

The Cosplayers didn't communicate before turning up

Gratuitous Pic of the new Resident evil 5 Chick


Nemesis and Brad were caught "together" in the back alley.


Alexia brought her own date :(

A few Spaniards tried to gatecrash

Leon was late for his own party...

Here's to another year of barely legible posts and highly inappropriate fanfictions to minor resident evil characters.


LONG LIVE TGAM!!!!

Luv n' Hugs,

Richie n Cunzy

Racoon City Times

On our trails through the blogosphere we stumbled upon this site: Racoon City Times. Of course straight away we were amused to see another Resident evil themed blog. Immediately, of course, we at TGAM chuckled at the glaringly obvious typo of "Raccoon" but with only one "C". As no strangers to tyops ourselves, we decided to overlook this and check out the content. As we are a games blog we shall review this blog in a games review style.

When you first start Racoon City Times there are a few things that strike you: The site is black, blatantly a rip-off of the old TGAM layout, even down to the font. The Silent hill Banner gets you confused as to what message this blogger is sending is it a resident evil site, is it a Silent hill site. And finally if you are going to use an obscure off-topic banner, at least try to make it fit the rest of your blog.

The Racoon City Times name conjures up images of a news report site from with in Resident evil, perhaps even a themed blog for resident evil news.

Hell maybe even a fanfic style blog from one of the reporters in Raccoon City (You must be Ben. Right? Get up!). But after the first couple of posts you are starting to see a trend which goes against all of your preconceptions, and not in a good way, you find yourself glancing over all the articles in the hope of getting the Resident Evil flavour that the title of this blog suggests. But to no avail... As you scroll further and further down you will realise there are no Resident Evil posts, you then scan over to the Labels, you see:
Obscure, Silent hill, Project Zero... And no Resident Evil.

Graphics: 1/10
Content: 1/10
Layout: 0/10

Overall score for Racoon City times: 1/10 (Abysmal)

Stupid Fucking Site More Like

So everyone on the internet likes to whinge but there is nothing worse than a loser and a not so loser that like to whinge about their shitty job, online, whilst they work at their shitty job.

Go here to read this big bag 'o' shite.



Here are the problems with the website "I'm a stupid customer service nerd" in a numbered list:



1) They whinge all the time about how crappy their job is yet never do anything about it like skim people's credit cards or leave the store unlocked on purpose.

2) It's as if they haven't seen Clerks or understand that they just come off as whiney nerds. Everyone has worked shit jobs but most of us managed to move on with our lives.

3) The woman (Mario Mark) almost never talks about women's issues such as periods, pregnancy boobs or grief online. Get with it bird.

4) They so desperately want to be UK:Resistance that they write about it in the comments all the time and steal their posts and spend most of the day in the work toilets furiously masturbating over a fantasy email from Zorg. It's never going to happen losers.

5) They pretend to be men on the internet. That is so early 90s. You can practically smell rag juice on each and every post. The smell is worse around the 24th of the month.

6) One of them, the gay one, pretends that 'he' has a girlfriend. Sometimes 'he' pretends they are married.

7) Most of the comments are between the blog writers. SAD.

8) Phorenzik has pretended to give up smoking for 10 days. We all know you have had a secret packet and have smoked at least twice every day.

9) They take photos of each other and then give them nicknames like "Smells of piss sandles man" and pretend they are customers.

10) They hide behind fake names and identities which is so weak. They won't even reveal which store they work in in case the manager finds out they've been clam-kissing behind the counter and closing the shop for twenty minutes.

11) Their website looks shit. White writing on a black background is the colours paedos use to groom underage dogs.

12) They are rubbish at games but pretend they are good.

13) They post fake interviews with celebrities. Gheeeeeeey.

14) Mario Mark is in love with phorenzik but phorenzik is assexual and really enjoys poetry.



Get a life guys and get off the internets. Boo hoo your life is rubbish and only the other spods from UK:Resistance pay attention to your depserate cries for help. Do the world a favour ladies, have one last double douche in the bath then slit each others wrists using a Wiimote. Then when you both realise that it wasn't that bad phone the ambulance and cry down the phone. I bet the only person to miss you would be your manager but only after a month when he realises that the counter has stopped smelling of fresh squadge.



Noogins.



Cunzy1 1 and Richie