That guy's a Maniac...

You have probably all seen this by now, the thing about the burnout ads. By probably I mean I know because I have spoken to Richie and the other reader of the blog and you've both seen it. Also, the blackhole of all gaming news kotaku has also had a post about it so all the stupid people have seen it too. Basially 37 people complained about the posters for the new burnout claiming that it might inspire people to vandalise or crash cars or somesuch. My initial reaction is to flinch into a rage because it's something negative about gaming and I'm a gamer and it makes an easy post to write and everyone else is writing about it. However, I've had a think about it and the thing that really irks me is the 37 London commuters who think that they are some kind of moral guardians for society. What kind of person, whilst waiting for their no doubt late or packed tube train, glances up from their London Lite and sees the ad and thinks "Jesus Christ! No. Not again. Don'

They Stole My Word!!!

So controversy week last week what with the Jamie Bulger thing in the new Law and Order game and Manhunt 2 being banned etc. etc. So why do video games attract so much controversy? Books, works of art and films are allowed to portray almost whatever they want. 9/11, racism, people who have their mouths full of cockroaches: many of which are dead but those that aren't are throwing up on themselves and each other and so on. But as soon as games do these things they are labelled as disgusting, evil, exploitative, cashing in on tragedy or just simply wrong. This very quickly gets backed up with all other lazy arguments condemning video games to create a nasty impression in the public media. The reason that this is allowed to happen in books but not games because stupid people don't read books but they do play games. Sorry stupid people. But it's true. Stupid people watch films too but films are 'high art' so for every mother on a crusade there are 40 LA film

Guess who's back. Back again..............

Ah well, doesnt matter what BBFC, Ther daily Mail or JT say... Sony spokesperson said: “It's currently our policy not to allow the playback of AO-rated content on our systems.” A Nintendo rep said: “As stated on Nintendo.com, Nintendo does not allow any AO-rated content on its systems.” From Gizmodo

We have another update from resident thatgirler Kaiser.Tia : Yeah, there's a confusion of the different issues with the three big game stories recently - the Law and Order case was just stupid - the developers should have known better then to use real-life stuff like that (it wasn't even a funny easter egg - just a dim-witted, under-researched example of a stupid development team). The whole Manchester Cathedral story is actually quite interesting - with games technology becoming able to render real-world locations in realistic detail, are games that showcase real locations going to have to ask permission first, like the film industry? I have a lot of sympathy for the CoE in this case, because I can't imagine they'd ever give permission to a Hollywood movie to film on location, especially a movie involving soldiers, aliens and shooting. I wouldn't be surprised if the games industry has to jump through similar hoops that Hollywood does when it comes to 

Yeah I’m sure we have all heard it, “Manhunt 2 – Banned in the UK”, for its Casual Sadism blah blah blah. Yeah the game uses a pretty nasty format, stalking and killing but hey I would like people to remember that it is a game. I would like to draw comparisons to Deerhunter: sneak up on the poor defenceless animal, blow its brains out… “Rejecting a work is a very serious action and one which we do not take lightly,” BBFC director David Cooke stated. “Where possible we try to consider cuts or, in the case of games, modifications which remove the material which contravenes the Board’s published Guidelines." Where do the differences lie then? Rather than a VIRTUAL generic forest, the game is set in VIRTUAL, dark, sordid, rust world. And rather than kill VIRTUAL mighty stags, the player can kill VIRTUAL human beings in VIRTUAL brutal ways. But yeah, we all know the generic formulae of Manhunt, stalk, sneak, kill. Seen a million times before, since the first stalk-em-ups on the or

The 20 Best "That Guys" of All Time. Not one mention of Cunzy, not one mention of Richie, not one mention of that guy that bit me... though he was a maniac.

Well, Seeing that Cunzy aint here at the moment… I though I’d give you a “Dinosaurs in Video Games” update. Today’s game is Guitar hero 2. Yeah that’s right Guitar hero 2! I’m sure you are all asking yourselves, “Dinosaurs in guitar hero? How? Where ? As if!” Well they are and they are not… there are 2 separate references to Dinosaurs. First up we have the two player select screen: As you can see from the above picture it depicts: - A Mammoth - Sabre-toothed Tiger - Some crazy extinct Ungulate. (antelope looking thing) - An ancestor of the foxes - An emu-esque big-bird - Smaller mammals, cats etc. - A Fighter jet dropping a bomb on them all. When I first saw this I was admittedly shocked to see some obscure extinct animals just on a 2 player co-operative sceen. But then I realised that this may be a graphical representation of one of the songs, which brings me nicely onto the next instance of “Dinosaurs” in Guitar hero 2: One of the bonus tracks: Fall of Pangaea

Position - Guest Writer We at thatguys.co.uk are currently recruiting new and original talent to "Audition" for the post of thatguys.co.uk contributer. Job Description The role is vaired but mostly involves ranting in written form. Where possible, throw in Video game, Resident evil, anime, Final Fantasy, and sexual references. Skills Required - Semi-literate in English. Recomended - Strong background in Resident Evil. - Hatred for gamer blogs. - No concept of teamwork. Starting June 6th 2007 onwards Position Based In Front of your PC Pay Rate non-existant Please mail an article with subject of your choosing to richie@thatguys.co.uk. Articles can range from 1 - 5,000 words, pictures are optional. The favoured articles will be printed and will go down in Thayguys history for all to remeber. Note: Dependant on quality. Certain candidates may be requested to join thatguys.co.uk as a Contributor

Well this is a different post to any other that I have written here. You may have noticed that since our one year birthday we haven't made any posts. That is because Richie doesn't make posts and well because I... I don't know how to say this.... but I. I'm going to leave the blog. My reasons? Well for the last time. It's time for a list: 1) As one of the only women writing on the interwebs about games I have faced nothing but persecution from people. One commentor said "You make me feel sterile". As a women and I blogger I could clearly translate this L337 as "You are sterile". Now I can take jiggery-pokery like the next person but when people make assumptions about my reproductive system and it's functionality then I say No! You can't tell me that. It's my ovaries and uterus and nothing but a spot of untimely blood or a doctor is going to tell me about them. 2) I'm happy in "real life" so I don't need a bl

When you see this: For the love of god dont think:

That's right kiddies it's TGAM birthday soon today it's officially TGAMB-Day-2. Shy Guy is pretty fucking psyched about it and so should you be. As Chief Brian Irons expresses we've not done bad for girls and who would of thought we would make it. We faced discrimination, legal threats, the PS3 launch, Richie's Animephilia, that month when blogger tried to shut us down, public (ish) ridicule from Miss Bea Havin from 1990's magazine Playstation Pro and the WoW AIDs. But we're still standing after all this time. Don't touch that dial and find out how you too can join in with the TGAM one year birthday. Noogins In the Front: Dinotopia and the Timestone Pirates In the rear: New Super Mario Brothers

We have the honour of presenting our guest writer Rebecca from out sister site the soon to be launched: thatgirls.co.uk Hi all, Rebecca here, to follow on from the lovely Richie's posts on the iPod plug-ins we have yet another iPod plug-in! This time it is from none less than my favorite shop in the whole world Ann Summers! Reasons why Ann Summers is the best shop in the whole world: 1. They sell sexy underwear. 2. All the staff are generally good looking, and extremely helpful. If you happen to be a guy and having to buy something for your lady friend... Just approach the staff, they dont judge! 3. They sell toys, special toys, special toys that do cool things. 4. They sell those cool panties that have little ties at the side, possibly the sexiest invention ever made on the whole planet ever. Please check out Richie's posts on these toys such as the iBuzz, the OhMyBod etc... The wonderous things about these devices is that it does go with any type of music.

From the top: 1) Sometimes it is good to preserve these things for the future. 2) Sonic Rush thank you for playing. I took this photo because I was going to do a tirade about how games these days don't thank you for playing. I didn't because I realised that Sonic Rush had been one of the few games I've completed for a long time so there might not be a ase to make. 3) Classic Timesplitters Future Perfect glitch. 4) Sometimes it isn't so good to preserve these things for the future. OUCH Chuff! 9? 5) Lethal accidents in Vice City. 6) The reality of DS gaming in England. 7) Killzone head on floor 8) A sample of the carnage after the first That Guy's con. 9)-12) Remember the Rag Doll years? Every game had to have ragdolls. These shots are from Killzone. 13) G-man got stuck in a teleporter. 14) 'Self portrait' by CJ. 15)Parker and Stone were right! Everyone has it. This was proof that even offline games wer

Desert island Dizzy was perhaps the second greatest game of all time after North vs. South and Haunted Maze by Ed Federmeyer. One of the reasons it was great is because of the music on the demo screen. It was awesome. It moved me in ways I cannot explain. A woman should not be made to feel that way by music alone *blush*. Ahem, anyway over at the formidable Overclocked remixes a chap called Makke has made an excellent remix . Granted it diverges a fair bit from the source material but it's a great song nonetheless: Dizzy_the_Adventurer_Mix_Dizz_OC_ReMix.mp3 In other news..... To all Bloggers announcing their myspace and then saying that "Yeah I have one but I don't use it, or whatever". It's OK. Myspace is much more popular than any blogs because real people use it as a social tool. Blogs are for fake people to boost their own egos. Well the people that use myspace aren't really people either. They are the same people as the Youtube people, the o

If you are as nerdy as me, you have no doubt gone about the web and read a plethora of girl gamer blogs, sites that have four posts on them, (most of which are copy and paste Etsy rummages from the excellent Wonderland) the latest post is about four months old, the comments boxes are largely empty and the only thought out article is one about “There are no strong female characters in video games”. Today I’ll be arguing that this is a bogus statement. This argument isn’t new but the release of Super Princess Peach prompted a revival in the “computer games femmes are often portrayed as weak argument” by male and female gamers alike. Now it seems that any female gamer wanting to say something on the internets has to have written something like this in order to demonstrate that they really care or have something of worth to say about it. Personally, given the choice I will play as a female character most of the time. They tend to be more interesting and less generic than male chara

Its Confession time... I was bored one day and, well, bought "Singstar Rocks" I have a friend who own "Legends" and "Popworld" and yesterday I bough the 80s edition. The maths behind this... 4 Singstar games I have played. Ok, ok before you judge, before you start saying things like, "Oh my god Richie, Singstar is meant for 13 year old girls", I need to defend myself. Ok , admittedly you are not going to get Jack Bauer playing Singstar, but it's sooo fucking funny, everyone should have copies for one good reason... Come home drunk, several friends, sing Karaoke. Genius! Highlights: "Rocks" Kasabian - Cutt-off Killers - Somebody Told Me The Offspring - Self Esteem (La la, La la la, la la, la la la) "Legends" The Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody David Bowie - Life on Mars Johnny Cash - Ring of Fire Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence "Popworld" Blink 182 - What's My Age Again? Rob

Yes it's the return of our "regular" feature The TGAM Maniac Award. This month the award goes to the 14 year old kid who called W_72 "sad for being a girl and playing computer games" over an Xbox LIVE headset during Gears of War. Good job nerd, but it'll be less funny for you when you have to start paying for games and Xbox LIVE subscription for yourself. Then you'll find out what sad really is. I feel sorry for generic Xbox Live kid47. They've got so much to go through, puberty, getting caught humping a sock whilst watching the shopping channel by their Mom, being a skaterkid for three months until your parents refuse to buy you a new board, earning your brown wings in the back of some guy's car for a bag of bon bons. Ahhhh! Sweet memories. Contratulations, Kid, your half way to becoming a real boy and you are this month (and this year's so far) Maniac.

.......from kotaku , which is alright I guess. Anyway, our skirts are literally dripping now so head over to here to get yourself off to screenies etc. In other news, I bought my first Xbox game today and it's a shameful one. Know what it is? Answers in a comments box plz.

So All-Star and TGAMer, Chuff_72, our eye on Xbox Live reports that yesterday: "Well I got home yesterday, and everyone in the world was logged into Crackdown waiting for the Halo 3 Beta to go live (it was supposed to at 2pm) and for some reason it wouldn't, so I went online and it was basically carnage! There were people on Bungie.net threatening to sue and one dude said he was gonna hang himself! Sooooo funny, I love people I do! All Bungie were saying was "sorry" so it left all these retards crying like little girls… Anyways they have apparently fixed it and both the Dr and I set it to download this morning, ready to go tonight - I will have a full TGAM Special on it tomorrow… probably." Which reminded me that there have been a couple of low blows to the Halo community in recent days. A lot of people rolling their eyes because there's a new game and it's going to so popular but no-one understands games anymore. It's not all about the twitchi

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. Re-hashed 360 titles, mediocre generic titles and a blu-ray drive just don't justify spending that much ££££. Sorry guys you've had a while to get me onside, but I’m not convinced. Or am I? FTW!!!!! Think about it, think about holding that controller: the back of it resting against the ulnarial digits (Ring and pinkie fingers), the index and middle fingers slowly curve round and rest, in a kind cosmic alignment, on the shoulder button and triggers. The thumbs circle themselves round, they hover slightly, the tip of the right thumb grazes the 4 buttons, circle, triangle, square and the ball of the thumb comes to rest on X. The right thumb caresses the D-Pad, almost admiring the contours of the different ma

Morning sports fans. If any of you remember hearing about that 3D scary resident evil ride, well the video for it is on Youtube. In Spanish. It's worth a watch for any Resident Evil fans out there. Here they are: Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 It's quite good so do check it out! Enjoy

You know who's L337? Me that's who. YEAH! BTW I have not played two of those games on my gamer card. Guess which two? Going underground, going underground. Seriously, I know you guys got some Xbox360 envy goin on right now. Check Mr.Terrible games at the bottom. The shame.

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 fro

Something is happening and I'm excited! Although, I'm getting a bit pissed off with these countdown sites. Especially you Mr Nintendo because in all likelihood Europe won't be seeing this game for another 5 chuffing years.

Ahahaha! Let's all point and laugh at Gamespot! In a feat of pure embarrassment gamespot have made a woopsie (typo) on nothing less than their front page! Look: Mortal Kombat: Armageddo? Armageddo? ARM-AG-EDDO? *Tut tut tut* Silly gamespot. Please note: I am aware that perhaps focusing on the misspelling of “Kombat” would have been a more amusing route to go with this one, leaving the glaring typo. However due to the nature of game titles, which can be as grammatically, punctually and semantically incorrect as they like. Couple that with the fact that Mortal Kombat : Armageddon was not a huge hit, I reckon this would cause more confusion than it would hilarity.

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). Gears of War and Dead Rising 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 affordable, it's not so geeky , it's fun (allegedly), I can play the entire Resident Evil back catalogue from 0-4 (that's six games people), both super smash brothers, it can talk to my DS, Crystal Chronicles, Pokemon, I know more people with a Wii than any other console (lot of non gamers too), I can play Pokemon Channel every day without finding all the relevant GC cables etc. I might get fit? Oh and virtual console has games that I might want to play (don't give me th

Yes, yes there is but it isn't Resident Evil Deadly Silence, it's Resident Evil Douche Simulator! We have insider information from someone currently testing the game. You'll be able to douche some of your favourite characters from the series racing against the clock to 'fresh that fem'. It was revealed to us that there will (surprise surprise) be unlockable characters. One of which is Zombie Female 3 from Resident Evil 2. Capco said: "she has green and bloody Douche-juice" Of course she does Cacpom. Of course she does. Expect to see it hit shelves in August and probably stay there for two days before being replaced with Sponge Bob Squarepants meets Catz: Barbie Princess Army Men .

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 bu

You know what bothers me? iTunes Visualiser, It has been out for about 4 years now and if any improvements have been made to it, they have certainly not been aesthetic. To be honest I don’t even turn visualiser on anymore, for two reasons, firstly that fucking apple logo pops up in the middle every 15 minutes, and secondly it is the same patterns over and over again. I would like a bit more coding going into the visualiser I would like it to read the ID3 tags and interpret the song names genres etc. Its simple, certain patterns will get created from certain genres: Metal/Hard Rock – Mainly black with fire motifs spikes and chains. Pop – Light breezy pinks, purples, blues, brighter. Electro – Pulses of neon colours. Classical – Hard to classify (sick) due to the range of classical music, suggest refined, bold colours like black and white, perhaps a sheet music motif. Spoken Word – Simple oscilloscope Podcasts – Given there appears to be a library of different patterns I belie

Woooo BOOBIES! Turns out X-Ray is a possibilty nowadays!! If you set your nightvision enabled camcorder to "near infrared"... These “near infrared” light waves are the waves that are penetrating the material and reflecting an image of the body surface. See the story here . Rock on...

Hey Kids! Given my morbid almost perverse desire to combine sex and video games, and since my last pose was waaaay back in February for my Valentines Day sex and video games ideas , I thought it was time for a quick update. There’s a bird out there that has designed a new Pong controller for couples. It’s a bra, grope the left one and the paddle goes left, grope the right one and the paddle goes right. Check out the videos here . I have to say that this is delightfully unimaginative, pong has to be the least arousing game/concept out there. However, granted that using erogenous zones as controllers is a masterful idea in itself. There has to be better games to apply this to, something a bit more fast paced… I dunno say an R-Type like game moving up and down, whilst rapidly pressing the fire button seems to lend itself almost too perfectly… But anyway so if you get two folk working together on this and given that sex gives that heady melding of two souls, could we potentially get a game

Right! It has been a week now. And Pokemon Pearl is fucking awesome! It is more of the same but with some fairly funky remixes. So what benefits does the DS bring to the series? Well… to be honest not that much. Most of the game is controlled with the D-Pad and DS buttons and there is not much cause to use the touch screen, you use the touch pad to select your pokemon attacks, thankfully the touch buttons are big and can be used by fingers and not the stylus. The only time the stylus really comes into play is the name input screen. There are other touch pad functions in the Pokétech, which is a device that shows up on the touch screen, it has a pedometer, the item finder, a clock, a calculator… all welcome additions to the pokemon world. Other than that the game Is playing along nicely with some rather interesting evolutions, including examples of sexual dimorphism, and allopatric speciation.