That guy's a Maniac...

We're finally on the Fire Emblem:Awakening train! Choo choo. To be honest, we've never really played a Fire Emblem game and until the last few installments they've been somewhat stealth releases in Europe (hence why a mint copy of 2008 Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Wii will set you back £70-£100). It wasn't until Super Smash Brothers that I even knew this series existed. The latest game, Fire Emblem: Awakening for the Nintendo 3DS widely received rave reviews and we can see why. It's a great little turn based tactical role playing game (for non-gamers you move little people around on a map) but an important element of the game is building up relationships between units that fight with each other so that your characters can fall in love. Aaaaaaah. Also, the game features 'perma-death', actually characters are 'retired', so if a character falls on the field of battle you're left with the decision to either go back to your last save som

We buy EDGE. We read EDGE. We are EDGE readers. Randy Smith writes for EDGE. We've previously wished that Randy Smith didn't write for EDGE. However, we may have to renege our wishes because he has written a nice article about Why Dead Rising Stands Out From The Hord e. As with all good game writing h e has perfectly enshrined my thoughts into words, thoughts I didn't realise I had until I read this. I love Dead Rising (including the Wii port). Randy sums up why. It's that feeling of me against the Horde. The way I play the game changes from moment to moment. I might be trying to save survivors, I might without really noticing it, decide to eradicate all the zombies from a particular area. I might just stroll about the casino/mall checking out the environment but always with one eye on the nearest group of goons. I know what I want to do and most of the times there's hundreds of zombies in between me and my own personal objective. Things go well I move on to the ne

AI in video games is often an oxymoron. Developers will boast about their superior AI and in the days when games came in boxes you might even seen it as a bulletpoint on the back- Most advanced AI ever! Yet with sad predictability chances are within ten minutes of playing you'll see a man with a gun take cover on the wrong side of a sand bag or take time out of the hell-on-earth battlefront to inspect a wall for ten minutes. One of our favourite moments of AI failure was when playing the original Red Faction on the PlayStation 2 (maybe?). The last remaining guard in a unit of 6 claimed to have us surrounded. Surely, you can program a guy to not come out with that particular sound bite when he is the only one in the room no? However, FPS AI is the drooling propellor hatted idiot when compared to thinking men's games, particularly RTSs. Recently, I was bested on a map on "retro" game Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. The map was Point Stormy if you know it. Image from Wars

I've been wanting to play Deadly Creatures since it came out way back in 2009. The premise is simple you play as a Desert hairy scorpion and a Texas brown tarantula and go about Arachnida business somewhere in the desert of the southwestern United States. The game is fucking brilliant and also flawed, totally linear but the game drives you on just because you want to see what's next. The game is also incredibly frustrating and right up to the end, death is only ever around the corner leading to occasional rage when a checkpoint is the wrong side of an unskippable cutscene in particularly tough sections. There's some odd reusing of the same level, a particular section of which you return to on four occasions and later level design tends towards laziness with invisible walls stopping you from wandering off piste. Also jarring is the end FMV sequence which is of appallingly low quality. Play alternates between the tarantula and the scorpion, the former is by far the best one

We feel every single death. The cute little bastards. They just want to help. They volunteer themselves just for your materialistic gain Olimar, they shouldn't but they do. We love Pikmin but at the same time don't play it too much because then there's a chance that more pikmin will die. We're not good enough to save them all. Oh god I'm gonna cry again. As for Olimar Kirby's weird temporary existing pikmin in Super Smash Brothers Brawl we're not sure that shit isn't banned under the Geneva convention.

...another whinge about the problem with pre-owned games. Our stance is very clear and we've bored each other (and hence 100% of the readership) silly with it but until news posts about it desist we won't desist looking on in amazement. Our problem with retailers is that they, in no way, really try to offer up the best of gaming. Older platforms vanish from shelves within weeks and new games enjoy the spotlight for a couple of weeks. We for example are keen discerning gamers at the time of life with a little bit of disposable income yet time and time again we have to head online or buy second hand games to get the kinds of games we want to play. At all. There isn't a brand new copy sitting on a shelf with convenient distance that I'm ignoring. I prefer to buy games brand new (although not on launch day and certainly not at the ridiculous prices some games are). In most cases, these games aren't obscure or limited run games. They're fairly big releases (recent ex

Prostitutes. More specifically, killing prostitutes. Having sex with a prostitute and then killing her and getting your money back. This is but one thing you have been able to do in Grand Theft Auto games since GTA III. Sure, you could view a thousand beautiful sunsets, save lives as an ambo paramedic, drive a motor bike off of a fuck-off great mountain and parachute to earth or, if you were so inclined, elope with a white priest on a yacht to a secluded stretch sea for some serious inter-racial homosexual making out sessions*. There were thousands of things you could do in GTA which is one of the many many reasons why the games flew off the shelves. It's kinda what 'sandbox game' means. Sadly it seems none of those other possibilities piqued the interest of newscasters, alarmist journalists or lazy politicians quite so much as the prostitute scenario. To labour the point, you could, if so inclined, you could just drive real slow and careful, looking for blacks . But of

From the Graudian article about tax breaks and umm acceptability of games comes the following comment from Mr Macabre: It doesn't help the industry in this country when British landmarks ARE used in games they threaten to sue! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_the_use_of_Manchester_Cathedral_in_Resistance What do you think will happen if they set GTA V in a replica London? Ooooh I don't know? Imagine if we set a GTA in London. What would we call that game? GTA London maybe? Is that what we might call it you fucking muggy cunt. Oh god and it would cause all kinds of controversy! Oh and to prove it, here is the wikipedia link you grade A moron. We might even be able to think of a number of shoddy GTA clones set in London if we thought a little bit harder but we're too busy firing off moronic thoughts into the internet site looking to pick up chicks. Mr Massivetwat is evidence enough that we don't want games to be acceptable in the same way that we don'

Spring is almost upon us! But new seasons do not always bring good tidings. Ruminate us up like a Mofo Omastar. Not wanting to put too fine a point upon it but you were a bit of a dick Kabutops .

Oh dear, rumours abound that Free Radical might be in trouble . Pre-2005 us are very sad indeed. This could be the saddest news ever. But that is only because we haven't heard this news yet , which in late 2008, will make us kill ourselves. Truer words are not written anywhere else. Post-2005 us will be holding a fourteen day party to celebrate, if the rumours are confirmed. The whole world is invited and we'll be burning copies of Timesplitters: Future Perfect and Haze and getting high and then getting dead on noxious fumes. The Facebook page for this party is up so feel free to bring yourself and all the chav kids from the bloc to ruin our house and stab each other so we can be on TV in a filler spot on BBCNews 24, in between the news about how to save money on mince pies and more news about the end of the world.

As you are no doubt aware the end of the world is nigh. If we don't deforest it to death we'll all poor ourselves to death. Fortunately, for the moment the recession seems to be hitting people who have more than one houses and mortgages and savings hard. So for the meantime gamers are safe. For now. However, Midway are not safe. Apparently they risk being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. This is bad apparently. Obviously, this sucks for Midway employees and for that we are sorry. On the upside we hope to god that the IP rights for Mortal Kombat are lost in the ensuing sell offs and folding because we, for one, think the world would be a much much better place without the poor man's Street Fighter. Good bye Mortal Kombat. And good riddance.

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

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 Zo

Dear Team 17 Please just stop it. Please. You are embarassing yourself and the former glory of the Worms franchise. How many iterations are there now? 15? 16? Don't get us wrong the first one was great. We spent hours playing it and the recent revamped versions have been okay but please innovate or move on. Are you happy with the consistent " 6-7/10 more of the same " reviews. Shake the series up a bit. I haven't purchased a worms game since the PlayStation release because every single one of the new ones feels so similar that I'm content to dust off the PS2 to play the original should I want to. Hogs of War was amazing why don't you do something like that but better? Oh and Worms 3D doesn't count at all. Why wasn't the last DS one online? Why don't you do clever things with the stats and camera angles and playbacks? International tournaments or something? How many people do you employ to do the same game over and over again. Wikipedia tells me 75.

Right well Today www.thatguys.co.uk is now 1 year old, I know some may argue that we are actually older than that, but it has been 1 year since we got the domain name. And we had to do a lot to get it too! I had to bare-fist-fight through legions of the undead, and Cunzy… well lets just say he's never been able to sit down properly since then. Image from the formidable Way of the Rodent who's award ceremony we sadly missed :( . To be honest we are all amazed that we have lasted this long! and we are very curious to know who actually looks at us?!?! Although to be fair "lasting this long" really only requires that we keep updating the site. We would like to thank all of you that have supported Thatguys in the last year, we hope that you will continue to support us too! We had an amazing year, we won a BAFTA for our ritings and we raised over £250,000 for a non-existing charity. We slagged of a bunch of people we thought would be petty enough to come down here

So you may have gathered from the title of this blog and many many of the posts that go with it that we are fans of the Resident Evil Series. It goes without saying. So we were midly excited to see the first videos of Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles. You get to play bits from all those Resident Evil games again! Check the latest video here . Now as much as we love the series and won't have a word to say against it ( excepting requests for DS remakes ), we are getting a little bit sick of seeing this guy: The first zombie you encounter in Resident Evil. His iconic putrid face marked the beginning of a genre (Alone in the Dark doesn't count). The cutscene he appears in marked only the beginning in a long series of games from the fundamentally broken Outbreak to the unanimous greatness of Resident Evil 4 (secretely Resident Evil 6). Killing him with a knife in the original was both tricky and a taster for the rest of the game. And then again in the directors's cut. And

Well it is a sad day indeed. I have recently learned that SFC (Stupid Fucking Customers) is dead, gone, deceased. In all seriousness it looks like the SFC guys were busted [via truth of the peasant], a blogger's worst nightmare. However, it just goes to show the short sightedness of the slave driving employers we've all had. They could've seen it for the tongue in cheek reflections of the dull dreary and endless jobs that we've all had and given the guys the go ahead to mention the name of the store as a kind of underground marketing exercise. But no, they decided that someone who had worked there for five years, pulling all kinds of overtime and extra shifts was worth firing because of a blog they had that gets people who work in the games industry chuckling. Seriously, did anyone not go to the store because they read SFC? I think if everyone knew where the store was we all go there to buy games and have our fingers crossed that we would be worthy in the eyes of

To:1 1 From: "Type-0" Wow! This new set up is very interesting Cunzy1 1. Your day note was quite boring you should really make an effort to learn japanese or some shit. I'm not doing the Wii jokes again! Anyway, here at TGAM Towers everything is great. We still have the same asinine commentors and a whole bunch of posts from the puerile to the interesting. What you missed (because it is possible to miss stuff that is posted on a website if you can't detract your eyes from the puke inducing colour scheme): Bewbs Bewbs Bewbs Oh hawt bewbs Bewbs Lol Bewbs and Biff

The internets! You dissapoint me. Following our request here I was expecting a torrent of videos this morning. But alas: I DON'T SEE IT THERE DO YOU? I had high hopes for the GMV/AMV (Game Music Video/Anime Music Video) Community. I was thinking that you all made derivative Naruto videos with a Linkin Park/Evanesence soundtrack only because no one was making good suggestions for you to use some creativity. This is your chance! A video of this design would bring you your internet five minutes (people online have a shorter attention span) of fame. You might have even got a five star video as rated by real people, not the fellow animu weabos from the forums. You might have made the front page of Kotaku. Do you want to be remixing your shitty video for the rest of your life in the name of fan service? We threw you a bone and this is how you repay us? Well, AMV community, we'll see to it that none of you work on the internet again. Fuckers. You've got one week before w