That guy's a Maniac...

This is part of an occasional series. Normally we catch up with the Nintendo Channel every fortnight and give the low down on what's happening. In August we got pretty fucked off because the only new content on the channel since August was a weekly downloads trailer that included 1950s Lawnmower Kids as its only download. I wish we were lying. YEAH THANKS BECAUSE I WASN'T SOLD ON THE CONCEPT UNTIL THIS STUPID ANNOYING VIDEO CAME ALONG. EGG ON MY FACE. I TAKE IT BACK. 1950s LAWNMOWER KIDS IS AN UNDER APPRECIATED CLASSIC. I IMAGINE. This months output has us grinding our teeth into dentine dust. It drives us nuts. Nintendo has a channel that sits on every single Wii . That's about 87 million owners right there. Okay so probably not all of them have ever used the channel but the channel has been watched for over one million hours by approximately 500,000 users. This number could be more but that's the minimum amount of players who have allowed their data to be com

Yes they be. SEE OUR PICTURES. See them. That is all we ask. Super Smash Brothers is a game that just keeps giving. We've been hard at work taking snapshots to remake the Bible as a webcomic only using Nintendo characters. Suffice to say it is a lot of work. In the meantime here's a bunch of stuff that may or may not make the final cut. Angel Land or something. Coming soon to a 3DS near you. INSERT CAPTION HERE. She's giving birth to a zero suit Samus. Which makes sense. I wonder how many bells Tom Nook will pay for this? Despite the hundreds of Zero Suit Samus photos on our Wii, we don't play her that much. TELLING. (:( ) HA HA HA JUST LIKE REAL HEDGEHOGS. This is for my illustrated fan fiction set in a Universe where Slippy isn't a massive prick. It's just like the film I imagine because it has never been released in Europe. IN OTHER GAMING NEWS: Nothing. Nothing of note is happening in gaming.

We love shit like this. The "way too much time on their hands" ness of it, the elaborate set up, hundreds of opportunities for cock ups and a seven year wait. THIS is hardcore. And thank god (punctuation aside) someone has the sense to make a video that's understandable.

Wow a proper review. Makes for a change huh? We were huge fans of the first game and although it didn't set the world on fire sales-wise it has a dedicated following. The second game is an improvement on the first in every way. The first game was a very relaxed adventure, leaving the player with relative freedom to explore the fictional region of Manauri, discovering various oceanic animals, photographing them and guiding visitors around the ocean. There was a very loose story driving the game but fittingly, the game was endless. You could (and we did) just keep playing forever with the goal of collecting all the species information and salvaging treasure. Each species has three bits of information, unlocked by finding an animal and then tickling, feeding or drawing for it. However, some of the creatures were a bit too crytpic and very hard to find once let alone three times (our playtime is up to well over 100 hours and there are still four species we've yet to see). Salvagin

The genius of Animal Crossing is that in the early days, you find new furniture, clothes, insects, fish and all the other items at such a rate you quite quickly become adept at organising your inventory and running back and forth to Tom Nook's shop a la Diablo. As time goes on, new items get rarer and rarer. Finding and catching those last elusive fish and insects become all night hunts, camping rivers and beaches to catch that damn tarantula or coelacanth. Weekly shopping trips to Crazy Redd get so disappointing as you look for that last painting or obscure bit of furniture. The good days get rarer. UNTIL TONIGHTS BUMPER HARVEST THAT IS! Perhaps the lucky clover had something to do with it? FINALLY Crazy Redd gave up the Triforce. By comparison, Link's various quests for the Triforce are a cake walk. One of the elusive squid visitors moved to town! I'd begun to believe they didn't exist. Like Animal Crossing's own Nessy or Jesus. We were resigned to the fact that t

Nintendo fans will know that if you buy new Nintendo games you get a little voucher which you can redeem online to earn Nintendo stars. In order to get the stars you have to fill out a quick survey about where you saw the game advertised, where you bought it from, who plays it etc. In return you earn nintendo stars- normally 250 per game and more for a console or handheld. You can then redeem these for exclusive nintendo gifts. Back in the gamecube days these would be pretty sad affairs, ringtones or desktop wallpapers. More recently though there have been some really nifty bits and pieces and seeing as the stars you earn are "free", why not splash out. In the past I've got a stuffed pikmin, a wiiwheel keyring and a metal pokemon DS game case (albeit in Spanish, however, as much as I begrudge it within two weeks of receiving it a bookcase fell on it and the metal case saved my DS games). It had been a while since I'd redeemed any stars and so I browsed through the cat

We've been playing a bit of Pokemon White recently (well, a third of us has at least). It tends to be how we play pokemon games, Weeks of intense activity, followed by months of abstinence. Then we're back in again and in again big. I've still got quite a lot to do, players will know how it is. Pokemon to catch, Ghetsis Goons to find, trainer card stars to acquire. I thought I'd try some online battling. My god. Frustrating. We already complained about the lack of imagination that players have back in April . Well it turns out that since then, the nuances of the meta game, tested through millions of online battles have trimmed down the options for a competitive team to what seems like a handful of team combinations. Not only does this make for very boring games but the easiest counter-strategy is for players to join in with a me-too team. Currently, you can expect to see Hydregion, Amoongus, Reuniclus and Chandelure in 90% of double battle teams. SNOOZE.

Yet another Pre-owned hurt my games sales. This time it's Q uantic Dream . I actually remember looking for a copy of it a month after it launched. For sale. In a games retailer. In London. Couldn't find one. But yeah, hey. I'm sure it the secondhand sales thing.

Hey kids, remember Omastar Comics , TGAM's hit webcomic featuring everyone's favourite fictional ammonite parody? Well there's a reason there hasn't been a new comic since April and that's because we've been in discussions with a major film studio to turn it into a film! Because films based on comics are always awesome right? There might be a game of the film too but that is still under discussion. Imagine being able to play as Omastar in a video game? Amazing. Here's a sneak peek at the current draft of the script for Omastar: The Movie. OMASTAR: THE MOVIE AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY BY Cunzy1 1, Richie!, Đoþþelgänger September 10, 2011 Directors' Revisions ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OMASTAR: THE MOVIE TITLE: OMASTAR: THE MOVIE -- ON BLACK, DISSOLVING TO COBALT BLUE EXT. OCEAN/UNDERWATER Blue, deep and featureless, the twilight of fi

Remember Syndicate? that classy retro sci-fi shooter the isometric backgrounds? An extremely original style and way of playing, still unique to this day? Well it's being rebooted!!!! Awesome, finally a chance to play this corker again... Oh... Wait... No... Turns out it's just being rebooted as an FPS: Bugger it Love and Persuadertrons, Richie X

Ninja Theory "the big retail model is creaking" and "the digital revolution can't come soon enough" Via EDGE Yeah sure it can't. Especially when you can't be bothered to do any market research before you spend three years and millions of pounds on making a game, do any proper marketing, don't do product support beyond launch day, you don't even sell your own game through your website*, new or pre-owned copies aren't available on the high street after week 1 and you don't do much localisation beyond English. Yeah. Gee. I wonder why your products haven't been selling like hot cakes. Boo hoo. * In fact on their official website they haven't even bothered to list their game Enslaved. You know the one that came out almost a year ago.** ** In fact... to: webmaster@ninjatheory.com subject: Your website kinda sucks To "The Webmaster" You haven't even listed Enslaved yet, you don't tell people where they can buy your ga

You play as a host of characters including; a legendary troll who cheats on his pregnant wife, a millionaire author, and a gang of deviants who have a reputation of rape, drug abuse and violence. They are controlled by an organisation rife with corruption, money laundering and various shady operations in impoverished countries. Answers on a postcard!

*/___ _ //[[ \/ || | * *|¬ / ~ === | \/__________/ * * |_ |/ * *\ \_| Fuck it. Imagine "Gears of War 3" written here in ASCII. =========== CONTENTS=============== [01] CONTROLS [02] Walkthrough [03] Tips [04] ============CONTROLS==============[02] Same as all the other games. =========== Walkthrough==============[03] Watch the cutscene at the beginning of the game. Then walk along the obvious path until the end of the game. Occasionally, the path might be interrupted by a cutscene or a shooting gallery section. Watch the cutscene or shoot all of the baddies from the fixed position and then go back to the beginning of this section, repeat until the game ends. ============Tips==================== [04] Sometimes you might find yourself exploring familiar scenes that have been mirrored. This means you have turned around and are walking the wrong way down the pa

We're not even going to do a proper Now Showing this week because it is so dire but jump on the Wii and check out the latest weekly download video. For those nintendinly challenged the only download this week is this .

Sexy-charged game Catherine has been hyped over the pond and beyond, but the EU have yet to get an actual confirmation on its release. Provisionally a few distributors have tagged this as December 2011, which is not unreasonable, with only its sub-risqué subject matter delaying (or perhaps even cancelling) its release. Catherine is set around a dude and his obsession with a girl surprisingly called Catherine and Katherine. Much of the sexyness of the game can be peeled back to a platform puzzler set in the protagonists guilty dreams. You know what? I'm just going to stop there, that is fucking cool. I know you can call it sleazy but c'mon my previous sentence... That's an original concept I'm playing it, Fuck all you nay-sayers saying it's for pervs. FUCK YOU. This game is worthy of my time, deal-with-it! Love and Guilty dreams about a game. Richie X

As summer begins to close its legs to the sporadic penetration from the suns rays, and winters chill creeps its icy fingers up those luscious thighs, we get stuck in the limbo that is Autumn, leaves turn brown and fall, but most importantly the nights get longer and darker. And thus we are justified in sitting in front of the box rather than constantly saying to ourselves that we need to get outside and soak up that hokum "Vitamin D". Rather than catching up on that latest drama series, or episodes of Family Guy, don't you thing you should give your console some love? This Autumn, Xmas comes early with a plethora of KILLER games, we kicked off the season a week ago with the much awaited and highly regarded sequel to Deus Ex! Booya some Sci-fi Action RPG with some beautiful and haunting sci-fi goodness. A long awaiting sequel that is a swing and a "hit" that hardly ever happens! but we also has some mishaps XBLA and PSN got the Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollect

If you believe the moronic notions of some of the bigger internet games """"journalists""" and seasoned developers then the Nintendo Wii , aside from having the dust continuously wiped from it is now a legacy platform. You know, now that the Wii -U hasn't even been released yet. Anyway, judging from the output on the Nintendo Channel the hype might be true. This is what we find odd about the Nintendo Channel. It is essentially a marketing tool for Nintendo products that comes with every Wii and according to the software data there's at least 500,000 players that watch it. That being said, the coverage is inconsistent at best. A number of promotional series have started and then abruptly been discontinued (the Warioware and Monster Hunter ones spring to mind) and since ONM have been in charge of the 'regular' Nintendo News episodes the quality has been very hit and miss. The recent E3 round ups were pants and there hasn't b

Well we've spent about 20 hours with Xenoblade Chronicles and overall we're enjoying it. First up is that you can download twelve tracks for free when you register the game with Nintendo which is nice. Something for nothing (well, for £40 but hey). Is it one of the best jRPGs or even RPGs of this generation as many reviews have been claiming? Possibly, but there are a few gripes even very early in. 1) Sound Bites. The noises that your party makes during battle get repetitive very quickly. They start repeating after about one battle. I'm sure that as the party expands you'll get to hear some more lines but how did nobody spot that it is irritating to hear the same phrases over and over again? It is grating and somewhat undermines the fiction of the game unless your characters are supposed to have short term memory loss or a total lack of imagination when it comes to battle cries. 2) TITS. Currently, the best armour for the female in the party seems to be a pair

Mad Catz are getting more and more credibility these days, i remember the days when 4 people sat round a console and "player 4" got stuck with the cheapy 3rd party controller that everyone dreaded. That controller used to be made by Mad Catz. Now they have released these controllers specifically for the gaming elite, for the "pro-gamers" allowing for things like interchangeable team plates. But most excitingly interchangeable D-Pad/Thumbsticks, making the 360 more like the PS3 controller, and vice versa. I'm still pining for this, 5 years on from getting the 360 I still prefer the DualShock PlayStation layout. However what bothers me about this incarnation and the thought and process put into it is that the 360 D-Pad seems the same. I really really fucking despise the 360 D-Pad, and have done from the start, firstly it's in the wrong place, though this is fixable on this gaypad, but it frequently just does not function well. It suffers from I-pressed-Up-no

Shock horror, dismay and tears. Over the past ten years of playing pokemon there were certain things that caused me dismay, the battery on "Red" depleted loosing all the hours spent on that. Telling doppelganger to get Pokemon, then further down the line him thrashing me in a 6v6 battle. And most recently, Taking my DS on holiday with Pokemon Black. I lost it, I left it on the plane, I spoke with KLM several times to see if it had been handed in, but no :( it's lost... gone... stolen... moved on... It is... no more Well it's not the worst thing in the world, the DS can be replaced, I may even get the 3DS for the hell of it. The thing that bothers me most is Pokemon Black and the time I invested. Along with that I have lost my Celebi, Zoroa, Zoroark, and Victini. Several event-only (i.e. time-sensitive) Pokemon, Zoroa and Victini were actually ones I was using when going through the game too! So, i dont know, do I play through the game again? do I ju

I only recently found out about Project Rainfall from that homo-du-jour Jayjay-Fahid Sulley, editor of a little website called videolamer we used to write for. Turns out Nintendo of America hates JRPGs. With a passion. Amazingly, there are currently no plans to release The Last Story , Xenoblade Chronicles and some other emo game in the United States of America. Crazy news huh? I thought Europe had it bad but Another Code R and the awesome Disaster Day of Crisis didn't get stateside either. I guess it's because Nintendo don't want people playing the old Wiis with Wii-U around the corner. God forbid people keep buying games for one of the best selling consoles of all time. That would be insanity. Can't wait for this crap though. Give me a poorly controlled generic cockney simulator over some crappy japanese games anytime you muggy bint.

Part 1 is here. This may be why the Escapist continues to be so shit. Here be a few gems from the Reddit: Robomonkster in response to the escapist claiming the crunch has caused strain: How are they 'feeling the crunch' with that many fucking ads? Have they found the other end of the online ad-revenue bell-curve, where they spend more money on the bandwidth for them than the ads bring in? Amen to that even if I did have a desire to sift through their poorly designed website through all that crap to find some theoretical gems the constant ads would drive me away. As it is I try other ways of watching Zero Punctuation so i don't have to visit the site and get inundated with advertising before, after, above, below and around and content. Acid Super Sam : "I respect the Escapist" Nooooo ho ho. What kind of person says that. Why god why?

That see it rise above the crap that has outsold it. I recently completed it so it only took me just over a year . It's a really good game . We aren't good enough with words to express it. It's a great game even are there words to express better than great? Here are eight little touches that, for me, made it a really greatastic game and why my heart is made heavy with the knowledge that we won't see a game quite so beautifully crafted or surprisingly fresh for a long time. 1) Detail in everything . Everything from collectibles to the snippets that your civilians will offer up in conversation through to incidental details in the cutscenes draw the eye. It's all been lovingly crafted to reward players who will care to look for those tiny little details. 2) Naughtiness . Not as in, lame pre-watershed sex scenes or characters who stream cusses but genuine naughtiness. Citizens send you rude notes , perhaps my favourite of which is a letter rating the princesses (O

No thanks to our interview five years ago . We remained true. STILL A SHALLOW GAME THOUGH. In other news. Hey, hey remember Resident Evil? That was pretty cool right? In Raccoon City and stuff and and the one in Spain with the non zombies. That was pretty cool. Hey you remember when, like the only thing that would make Resident Evil better was loads of shitty dialogue that actually takes itself seriously and generic S.A.S bullshit and ziplines and helicopters and terrorists and all that boring generic military crap that nobody finds cool? No. We don't either .

Earlier today I picked up a copy of Ready Player One. A little bit less earlier today I put it down. Finished. It's a really great book. Okay, so the set-up is a little flawed to engineer characters fourty years in the future with the geek sensibilities of a 2011 late-twenties-early thirties geek but it's forgivable. This book gives hope to geeks everywhere who may take solace in a scenario (albeit fictional) that actually makes use of all that knowledge of books, films and games that we have to save the world.

In today's Observer Carole Cadwalladr (who?) writes part of her column on the interesting statistic that wikipedia is a very mael dominated site. Fair enough. She then however, equates this to men controlling human knowledge (wikipedia's version of it). Pathetically she compares the word count on the page for menstruation against Star Trek and gender inequality against William Shatner. Something Awful have been covering the patheticness of wikipedians for a long time and to be frank, a lot better than award winning Carole's attempt. To look at these statistics and come to the pithy conclusions she does and to try to equate this to equality is special pleading of the kind reserved for Sunday newspaper columnists struggling to make up the word count for their articles. Wikipedia is written by volunteers. Draw conclusions about what men do with their free time as compared to women (shopping? being duped by cosmetic adverts? shoes?), fine. But men controlling knowledg

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

So a while ago I was really excited about Marvel vs Capcom 3. After completing it a couple of times I grew tired of it, after pondering why, given that I love the characters and also Capcom games, I think it was just shallow. Short of a ladder to fight over and over and some unlocks, which are either crappy gallery things, or the hidden characters, which can be gotten in a couple of hours. In short, completed it once, unlocked the characters, and that was me done with it. Then Mortal Kombat came along. I had been a fan of the original Mortal Kombat since disk swapping it on the Amiga. Though I ignored many of the 3D iterations, MK4, Armageddon and Deception. The latest Mortal Kombat is great! Primarily because they brought back all the retro fighters and moves, but also because it had more depth than MvC3! I'm going to say it, Marvel versus Capcom 3 is a shallow game! Mortal Kombat has over 300 challenges, story mode, and some worthy alternate costumes to unlock. The onlin

Yes people with astonishing predictability at least one newspaper is saying the riots in London are inspired by GTA. First of all this is idiotic. GTAIV is now three years old. Secondly, you can't 'riot' in GTA. Almost as soon as you set something on fire, the fire engines turn up and the police show godlike tenacity and initiative when you start a crime spree. Perhaps we should get our police officers and firemen to play GTA and it might inspire them to be more effective? Secondly, this is yet another example of sloppy reporting by the media. These riots were clearly inspired by 1999's Urban chaos, where gangs take to the streets to fuck things up and: The 2002 game State of Emergency. And look! It's by Rockstar, the same purveyors of such filth as Bully, GTA, Table Tennis and Manhunt. Do your fucking research you lazy media cunts.

Xenoblade Chronicles. Here be the trailer. What's not to love? It's got more than a little bit of Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers about it, two games which I like a lot. Talking to a couple of gaming pals about it, their response has been "since when did you like JRPGs?". A fair question. I don't and I don't normally like games with Xeno in the title. But I do like big open games with a sense of environment and it looks like great care has been taken over the setting. Finally! A game I'm actually excited about. Let's hope it doesn't dissappoint.

I have holiday and I've been trying to bust as many games that I've half started as possible. Kirby's Epic Yarn A lovely little game that appeared quite easy to 100%. I was wrong. Clocked it in at just under 20 hours in the end. Stupidly, I left all the challenges until the end so the last hours or so was just burning through the repetitive and sometimes tricky challenges. Soundtrackwise, many of the new tracks are as sublime as the classic old tracks. Fun. Little King's Story I'd put Little King's Story on the back burner for a long time. Typically because when I play it I get sucked in so I don't attempt to play it unless I know I have time free. It's a game that still gives even late on where lesser games tend to add all the padding. It is also still challenging although I do end up restarting a lot because I'v become very attached to a little hunter of mine called Stella. She was one of my first citizens, she's married to a guard and has

That time of year again. Another stupid gaming awards ceremony. The problem with game awards is that they try to be like film awards but games don't really work like that. Let's have a look at the UltimateGOTY nominations: Sad face just doesn't cover it. Maybe the selection isn't that bad it's just well, this screenshot says everything doesn't it? Is this it? Is this what we'd be dreaming next generation was going to be delivering? Here's the same selection with sequels and remakes taken out. Two interesting but flawed games. Do that excercise again but only keeping PC games, or downloadable games or pah. Same old arguments. Unlike films, there are a bazillion games released every year and I know that my personal choices don't overlap with everybody's but there are a few outstanding issues. What's with the categories? Either have categories that work or just make em up. I know I'd never put Portal 2, Dead Rising 2 and Little Big Planet 2

You may have read this story last week about the tragic death of a 20 year old killed by deep vein thrombosis, supposedly from playing Halo online (ODST? Reach? The original?). You can predict how the rest of the story goes. The parents say they thought it was safe, Microsoft point to that small print that comes with their console, in the instruction booklet for every single game and even flashes up as a message in many games "Time to take a break kids". My initial response was that long stints of doing anything causes all kinds of medical problems but a friend pointed out that even if you were reading a book for twelve hours straight you'd move around more than if you were gaming. Nothing else exists like gaming to fix your attention so avidly. Dead arms, pins and needles and head rushes are par for the course for gamers and chillingly, this story reminded me of marathon sessions in my youth. Fortunately, necessity means I don't have time for hours and hours of play

Barry Burton nipples.