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Where do we go, from here...

I still feel sad after I heard news of this: The Loading bar . We have, for years, contemplated the possibility of our own little gaming themed pub, though admittedly it was supposed to roll off the success of thatguys.co.uk. Which, if we were to take our market research from, we would have Sheeva Nude, and Gay Dante themed bar. However where does this stop? Gaming culture has come leaps and bounds since our blog started a little over six years ago (SIX!) there is a definite acceptance and hip-mainstreamism (akin to geek-chic) of gaming. It has taken much longer than I expected for a theme bar to be created, at least in the UK. The Mana-Bar in Australia aka Yahtzee Croshaw's bar has been open for ages now. But why only bars, we have nightclubs for music, cinemas for Movies, we used to have arcades for games (Ha!). We occasionally have E3 and other over hyped corporate events. But these are yearly, and as much fun as it is to get confirmation that Game X has been confirmed at t

Depression

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NOT A LOT GOING ON IN GAMING FOLKS. There's all that sexism rubbish which might be worth discussing were the internet version of the gaming community not a multiheaded siren screaming inanity. E3 failed to get anyone hyped about anything (those few people pretending that smartglass is a thing are clutching at straws). But don't worry kids! It isn't all:   AND   Umm. Well it might be. We hadn't thought past the joke. Quick look, a Final Fantasy VII rerelease... Phew that was close.

Devil May Cry HD: Finally

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So we finally got DMC:HD Collection. Despite not one fucking retailer selling it any more, I mean seriously... There is no copies of this anywhere, this collection came out when the GAME group was in receivership, liquidation, bankruptcy or whatever bullshit umbrella term they were using for the poor business model of forcing the unwitting public to buy the latest pap that paid them dividends. Anyways it came out when GAME was briefly shut, and as such they never got it in, but also it seems no other supermarkets or other retailers seem to have it either (which makes us consiprationally question the distribution of games!), so it was off to the internets where, without fail, we got it, and first hand too, so no more fuelling the pre-owned machine. But yeah digressions aside... We fired this up a couple of days ago starting with DMC1 and to sum it up; first impressions were that the game was hard! I remembered most of the locations and hidden items/secrets, but I was really strug

We've given away too much of our soul

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In between, twitter, reddit, forums and comments on all those fucking sites that never repay the favour I think we've given away a bit of our soul. We're all gamed out* Here's a thing. A feature. What she said until we've got some more inspiration. Uuuuuuugh. THAT WAS THE BAD THING. E3. We just remembered. Oh god. *Without actually playing any games. Aside from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon again. That barely counts. That's us in coasting mode** ** NOT TRUE, NOT TRUE we played Paper Mario. It's s'alright.

The Art of Video Games

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The book. This one. Not The Art of the Video Game or Video Game Art or The Art of Game Characters or Creating the Art of the Game or Game Art . Those are different books. We won't be talking about those here.  The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect is the catalogue of the exhibition with the same name that is still running (until September this year) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition has been widely described as crucial but very conservative. It isn't the first video game exhibition or the first time that games have been on display. The Science Museum in London put together a very interactive exhibition called Game On and the Design Museum had a very small installation of the design of games. Also the HTTP Gallery (now Furtherfield) had a very cool exhibition a while back. It is the first exhibition however, by a big institution, a big art institution that treats games as games within their own right. The subtitle "From P

E3 Balls

So it's E3 again. Already. Everyone gets way too excited, few let important things such as facts get in their way. We're going to be extending all of our tendrils during E3 and we'll keep updating this post when thoughts occur in our brains. Errr steady on MCV, this year's isn't even over yet and they're starting coverage about the next one . Hmm. More Wii U speculation. This time it's Mass Effect . Possibly. So that's yet another AAA game that's already on the HD platforms that may appear on the Wii U. Forgive us for not wetting our pants yet. There's a Painkiller sequel. To go with the four ports and 200 expansions. CARE FACTOR = 0 Crysis 3Zzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz  Will this one even turn a profit? No. No of course it won't. We just can't hide our surprise. Sony, the makers of PlayStation. Are making an accessory that turns the PlayStation Move into a steering wheel  well into a hang glider thing! W

Marcel on E3

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Wait. You too? How did he?...

The Loading Bar

Aaaargh! They stole our idea and and they have the best fucking name BASTARDS, CORNISH BASTARDS * THEY HAVE A DRINK CALLED G AND T VIRUS ! Uuugh. Disgustingly brilliant. We're done. Oh also we turned six years old and as predicted missed it. Completely missed it. We'll be honest we're running on fumes. * Secretly jealous. 

The heat. It burnssss us

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It's hot outside which means vidjo games, in contrast to cricket, have to be cancelled due to fine weather. Everyone, literally everyone, else is going to parks and filling up beer gardens and the social pressure is for us to do that too. Plus, because we have to open the windows, we can't see our screens anymore. Lastly, because all our energy has melted away, the slightest excuse prevents us from playing most games. Can't play Sonic Mega Collection to unlock Comix Zone without finding the right memory card first? We'd probably die of dehydration trying to find it. Have to take the Wiimote our of it's condom to put it in the Wii-Zapper? Death unless you've got a parasol to protect you. Standing up to play Kinect? Make sure you take at least five litres of water. Luckily though, there's always Pokemon*. Nice safe, friendly Pokemon sitting in the DS, flick it open, turn it on. Gaming happiness from our melted pool on the floor vantage point. We can even secr

"Crunch time"

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You know, its not often I talk about the games industry and the depravity and filth within, however today I would like to bend your ears, open your eyes and perhaps even educate the cretins and executives out there. For the non-industryer "crunch time" is when a game, DLC or whatever is reaching it's deadline. This deadline will suddenly make everyone involved on that project start working at 200% (usually up from 50%) to get everything done, creating a great deal of stress on budgets, quality and people. The deadline itself is usually enforced by marketing, or by a separate publisher, who has dictated that, "this needs to happen by then". Now, why does this exist? In short, this exist because of poor project planning. The tl;dr version is: Persons are placed in positions of authority and management, due to internal promotions i.e. low ranking programmers, developers and even testers who get given these tasks, without professional qualifications or certifi

Gay

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We picked this up from father of MUDs (or another appropriate title), Richard Bartle: When role-playing games offer the possibility for player characters to romance non-player characters, the pressure for including same-sex relationships doesn't come primarily from gay players. Rather, it comes from straight male players who are playing female characters and get creeped out when they get hit on by male non-player characters. Now he's a man who would know but I'm going to call Bouffalantshit on this one especially as it isn't qualified at all. is this an assumption or assertion? Are we talking about existing games, theoretical games or the two or three games that virtual world scholars study? Has anyone talked tot he developers who make this decisions and asked why they do/don't allow same sex relationships? Or at least I'm hoping it is all codswallop. Far too much has been written about gender and identity in games but for our liking none of it has re

Rise of Nightmares

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Remember when we promised content ? Here's some of it. About four years ago we played Rise of Nightmares on the Kinect and on the Xbox 360. We weren't impressed with the Kinect line-up at launch  (still aren't to be honest or happy about subsequent Kinect games) it was a rushed gimmicky effort to try to sway some of the bajillions of people who had played Wii Sports into buying an Xbox 360 and then, presumably get them onto proper games or something. Although games seem to be a low priority for Sony and Microsoft who seem to be fighting to be the all-in-one home media centre of which games is a small part. Then, it turns out that everyone and their dog is doing cool things with a Kinect. Everyone except people who make Kinect games that is.  That would have been absolutely fine an' all except the Kinect games were all a bit pap. Including Rise of Nightmares . Under no circumstances should you play Rise of Nightmares single player. It is an exercise in extreme

Coming Soon:

Content. That's right kiddywinks, from the same team that brought you all of this , expect to see some content just above here sometime soon.  Every year, without fail we fail to celebrate the passing of another year of TGAM. Well we've got 10 more days to remember to do something. Will we remember to celebrate a whole six years of gaming related drivel? Or will we, as is tradition, just stop blogging for that whole week? OH, IT'S SO EXCITING and the only way you can find out what happens in this exclusive, nay, WORLD exclusive event is to just stay on this page F5ing. Well not this specific page but the main home page www.thatguys.co.uk Unless you are already on the main page, in which case carry on. Mac users can join in the fun too by stroking their iComputer every ten seconds I think that's how it works. The countdown begins here: Richie can you insert a countdown thingy here by Monday? Thanks. Oh and if you don't get around to it can you make sure t

In game advertising

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It hasn't happened yet but we remember distinctly being distinctly worried in a very distinct fashion around the time that gaming really took off as there were rumblings of in-game advertising being explored as a thing. We were worried that if advertisers got the keys to our games, they'd end up looking as gaudy as real cities and we'd find ourselves strangely drawn to brands we'd never paid much attention to before. Fortunately, that never really happened. Red Bull got into a couple of games, Wipeout and Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death . The brand seamlessly sat in the world of Wipeout . Not so much Judge Dredd . From what I can recall instead of making your way around generic docks and warehouses filled with normal crates, you made your way around docks and warehouses filled with Red Bull crates. Other than that I can't recall other adverts for real world brands in games ( Mario Kart has in game billboards, hilariously advertising "green shells" and

Moetry in Potion

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Last time we were all gushy over five Wii games that have re-ignited our passion for games. Today we pick up that blog post, flip her over only to see the puss filled and warty fissures caused by the ingrowing hairs that is average Wiiware games. Just in case you've been a fanboy of other formats up until this second, Wiiware is the Nintendo Wii's downloadable game service. It is a real mixed bag. There are gems and they are the likes of Lit, Maboshi's Arcade, Jet Rockett, Final Fantasy: Subtitle subtitle, Nyx's Quest, Sword and Soldiers, Lost Winds 1 and 2, World of Goo, Art of Balance ... wow now that we start to list them there's quite a few good 'uns and many that put bigger box release games to shame. TO SHAME WITH YOU.  The problem in the past has been that Nintendo (Europe at least) has been fickle in the extreme. The ficklest in fact with allowing players to try Wiiware demos before they buy. Sometimes NoE releasing a dribble of Wiiware demos. S

Poetry in Motion

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We bought BIT.TRIP Complete when it came out and we've voluntarily relegated ourselves to the naughty step for not telling the TGAM Massive all about it.  For those of you unawares, BIT.TRIP was a series of six Wiiware, PC and devices-beginning-with-a-little-i games that came out from 2009 until 2011. They got good reviews but we weren't tempted to take the gamble. Plus, downloading new Wiiware is preluded by an hour long mini game called "Try to micro manage the selection of Wii games and channels you want with the tiny amount of space the Wii hardrive has" which is not intuitive, slow as fuck and all-round frustrating. However, the gods of gaming have smiled upon us by using divine intervention to convince the publishers of BIT.TRIP to release all six games and a soundtrack as a boxed Wii game. It will never sell huge amounts. Despite being multi-platform the brand is not well known and you'd be hard pressed to know what the games are about from the box

Dead Space Martyr

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In a moment of not being particularly inspired at the book shop I ended up buying Dead Space Martyr, knowing nothing about it other than it is set in the Dead Space Universe. We really liked Dead Space, something set it apart from the overflowing bundle of sci-fi future space shooters. It stuck with us in a way that other games in the same pool haven't. See, we've played Halo and Gears of War. Worse even we've read every single Halo novel and watched the anime compilation Halo: Legends. Yet if you were to ask us what happens in Halo. It's a total blank. The whole SPARTAN programme we remember and then there was a Halo? And some Zombies? And the Pillar of Autumn. That was all Halo, Halo 2? No idea. You could duel wield. Halo 3? The theatre mode was amazing. Oddly we remember more about Halo:Reach even though it's probably the worst of the bunch. Gears? Well there was emergence day and then a giant worm. When Epic ran their poll to determine whether or not the thi

The 'Real' Cost Of Used Games

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First up read this , it's Richard Browne (pictured below) from umm, well he's an industry veteran okay. And he's finally willing to bring to the table that much missing piece of evidence to prove that pre-owned games are killing kids, raising house prices and toppling the game industry. At last. Some actual evidence to scrutinise rather than a dev sounding off because their last poorly marketed shite game that sat on the shelves for two weeks didn't sell as much as Wii Sports . That key piece of evidence? A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. [via Gamesindsutry international ] Ah, okay. That appears to be an anecdote and a suspiciously tall tale. Bro

Progress. Whore.

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Do you know about the backloggery? If you don't you should know about the Backloggery . It ticks a lot of boxes in our brain. You create and account and then (manually, but it is worth it) add all the games you've played, review them and then note whether you've not beaten the game (bronze), beaten it (completed the 'story' that's a silver medal) or 100% (gold medal) of for those doubly hard bastard out there MASTERED IT (a gem that denotes you've played a game inside and out and back again). Then after all that at a glance you can see what percentage of all the game you own you've seen all the way through to the end. You may find it all a bit arbitrary and in the same vein as the compulsion to "Thousand" games on the Xbox 360, beating the game and getting all the achievement points for it. For us, the backloggery helps us to document and progress on the all the games we own and haven't finished yet. I don't know about you but we h

Seven Deadly Sins of Gaming: FEAR

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Oh shit. Here's an original idea, a new feature from TGAM looking at the seven deadly sins of gaming. For our other long running and not at all forgotten running features see practically every post we ever did. For the absolute originality of the Seven Deadly Sins theme just google "Gaming Seven Deadly Sins". 0 hits you'll find.  So here's out brand new feature that will probably peter out. Peeter out? Pooter out? Petre out? trail off after this one. We're looking at fear. But we aren't just about new features, we're about features within features so before the word feature starts to look weird, here's the latest on the Seven Deadly Sins of Gaming: FEAR from out in game correspondent surveying the populace of Xenoblade Chronicles . What do they have to say about either new features or FEAR in games Alcamoth Citizen? Oh shit me that is pretty fearsome. Fear in games comes in many forms. Survival horror is often said to be scary but as I&