That guy's a Maniac...

You know saying things are "like Marmite", is like Marmite you either love it or hate it. That's right there's no middle ground its black or white no shades of gray, no 6 out of 10's, its either 0 out of 10, or 10 out of 10! They are opposite ends of the spectrum, Violet and Red. missing out all the greens, blues, oranges and yellows in between. And Squaresoft are apparently the same, their games are either "teh SuXXorZ" or "Epic wins". After a slew of Epic wins: VII, VIII, IX, X, everything just seemed to go wrong for them, they made a very girly sequel to FFX, an expensive niche MMO (for PC AND consoles), a single player MMO at the end of a consoles lifecycle, and then XIII finally! After nearly 10 years since FFX, Square made an actual RPG where you level up your dudes and you know chocobos and stuff. But something was wrong... there was grumblings in the internet there was horrible talk of a 30 hour training section, but still we

He's back and more spirally than ever. In this edition of Omastar Comics. Well you'll see soon enough.   Honestly, these newer Pokemon don't even know they are born. Just wait until you've been reeled out for over 100 spin off games, merchandise and theme parks. Then you'll lose that racist attitude.

Nintendo Channel: Poor Showing would be more apt. We log into the Wii's Nintendo channel every week and see what is on offer so you don't have to! This week's poor showing is: Something about Resident Evil Revelations . I'm sure it is great (well reviews don't say it is that great) but I'm a little bit underwhelmed by Capcom's marketing output. Ooooooh it has a chaptered structure. Great it has a cast that is beginning to rival Sonic in terms of blandness and breadth! If I wasn't a Resident Evil fan those two points aren't exactly selling the series to me yet this is the second or third Nintendo channel clip of Capcom staff talking about those two very very dull things. Another pointless Player Challenge video for Mario Kart 7. We whinged about them before .  There's a new weekly downloads trailer. I don't know about you but Balloon Kid, Double Bloob, Successfully Learning Mathematics Year 3 and The Very Hungry Caterpillar's ABCs

As I mentioned earlier , I played through FF7 with some nice mods, to increase the quality of the graphics and such. There were some other mods to break the 9999 limit on everything, allowing you to deal over 9999 damage, and your HP could be over 9999 too. however enemies could also hit you for over 9999. and the most fun one was "Aeris Resurrection" the guys over at Qhimm.com created a little patch to keep her in your group and to allow you to keep using her and the time you invested in her, they even added dialogue for her during the rest of the game and a hand new upgrade to her "ultimate weapon" replacing the Aeris ghost scene when revisiting the church later in the game. Done really well! I thoroughly enjoyed replaying it, remembering 99% of the secrets and locations. I even bested Emerald and Ruby Weapon, though cheaty... I used Aeris level 4 limit break which renders you invincible for the duration of a battle, but still, I wasnt really in that game for t

Previous whinging here. Today's developments are that GAME CEO sees their continued slide into financial troubles caused by the groups overeliance on hardware and hardware bundle sales to mean consumers want more hardware. Via MCV : "The hardware market was much more negative than the software market. That tells you the industry and the consumer is ready for more innovation there" Here we were staring at our Wii*, 3DS** and Xbox 360*** thinking we were waiting for new decent games to come out. Apparently, what we were secretly thinking was "Gosh! I would love to splash out a couple of hundred quid on a new console that provides marginally better graphics in these times of economic shitness". And I'm sure that the millions of people with consoles sitting under their televisions are thinking the same thing. You called it CEO Ian Shepherd, King of poor retail management and myopic business sense.  * Oh sorry I forgot, Last Story is due out this year

Oh my god you guys, watch this:  THIS IS DISGUSTING. Capcom should be ashamed of themselves. Did they not learn from Resident Evil 5? This trailer is so racist.   1) First of all this game is telling four year olds (everyone knows that four year olds play these games) that it is okay to shoot white men who are world leaders. Could've made the president black or a woman or a black woman. But no. A white guy. Disgusting. Don't they know that this kind of imagery (people shooting white presidents) is charged with history?   2) It is racist against white presidents who wear glasses. Ut oh, I'd watch out if I were you Giorgio Napolitano cos come 2012 there's gonna be a whole bunch of racist four year olds trying to shoot you up in the face/eyes.   3)All the zombies are white ironically, including a jumping zombie. Don't they know that this kind of imagery (white people shooting jumping white people) is charged with history? Capcom just assumes all gamers ar

No new posts for nine days. None of this half arsed one day business. Take that SOAP.  In other news : ALL GAMES ARE THE SAME. Totally homogenised. There's nothing to even be excited about anymore just mindlessly going through the motions of playing new game X which is exactly like all the games you already played last year. Not even a 'trailer' for Resident Evil 6 can get us excited considering that only 1/3 of us played RE5 and none of us have a 3D(NO GAMES)S to play the other two Resident Evil games. Fortunately there is star shuttle to tide us over.   HERE'S A POEM ABOUT STAR SHUTTLE   Tsssssssssshhhhhh (bottom thruster)  Tsssshhhhhhh (right thruster)  Tshhh tshhh tshhh (Left, top then right thruster)  Tsshhhhhhh (top and front thruster)  TSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHH (All thrusters in thrustration)  Tsh (Top and back thrusters)

Okay so we're a teensy bit worried that REORC is messing with the Resident Evil format but this video is kinda cool. I'm just a bit disappointed that it wasn't the Nemesis who appears at the end but what you gonna do? Oh and German subs so might learn some German.

If you live in or have traveled through London you will have no doubt encountered discarded newspapers on tubes, in the street and in lunch and common rooms across the capital. If you are lucky you might find yourself with the Evening Standard or the Metro to help lunch/train/bus journeys fly by a bit quicker. If you are unlucky it will be City A.M . a boring newspaper about the city and stocks and graphs and FTSEs. However, recently I've not minded flicking through City A.M if only to follow the slip slide of GAME group into liquidation (possibly). In today's City A.M some goon from GAME group was blaming the lack of a new console cycle as a cause of their poor success. Okay, so I know very little about economics and markets and stocks and shares but I'm going to go out on a limb to say that it is pretty retarded to rely on the console cycles in order for the business to stay afloat. In the same week that sales of the Wii have topped 30 million across Europe you'd

I have been messing about with windows 8 recently. Just to see its compatibility with older games and just the general feel of it. Windows 8 upon start up presents you with a slide-to-unlock screen akin to the Windows Phone, though entirely pointless if you are not using a touchscreen (though a simple tap of the space bar works just as well, if not faster) you are then presented with an "app" screen. Its not too dissimilar to the windows phone or 360 interface, and feels a little iOS too, though it's debatable as to whether this is a good thing on a desktop/laptop: As you can see this is your typical workspace, undoubtedly designed for a touchscreen interface. You have apps (which when clicked on/tapped expand into their own fullscreen versions) as you can see, there is an inbuilt twitter/RSS/Weather and the Facebook app "Socialite" doesn't work currently. Those with keen eyes will also see Final Fantasy VIII! Well I just dug out my old copy of it an

It's our first look at the Wii's Nintendo Channel in 2012 ( here is all the previous Now Showings). What will the hit-and-miss Nintendo channel bring this year? Our money is on- inconsistent videos, series that inexplicably end after one or two videos and in general poor use of an otherwise extremely well placed marketing tool. So what do we have? Bizarrely, Nintendo TV  the monthly show from the Official Nintendo Magazine, has been reset back to episode one again for the new year. There's now a woman presenter rather than that Welsh chap but sadly it seems the script writer hasn't changed. Expect cringey dad-joke "humour" in spades. One improvement in this awful ONM vehicle is that the episode is now divided up into different sections. Hopefully this means we won't get quite so many Mario/Zelda retrospectives/love letters. There's two tutorial videos up for Boom Street , Nintendo's odd Dragon Quest/Mushroom Kingdom/Monopoly game. The tra

We did a puzzle Back when we were excited about MvC3 we did an homage to Poison You know that regular piece we do? You know Unit of the Month? No? Crazy We realised Something We had too much free time We did a lengthy piece on "Digital Convergence" We predicted it  Black and White came out We decided we weren't  having fun We did an  Interview We lost something We invented the quadruple/triple inverted commas We joined the 3D fad Well that is it for this year, we'll be back in 2012 for the Mayan apocalypse, a million HD remakes and announcements of the next consoles? Abba said it best... Love and Next year we promise it'll be better, TGAM X

I was really struggling to recall any stand out gaming experience this year. There were plenty of polished experiences but nothing that particularly blew my mind. UNTIL LAST NIGHT! We treated ourself to Wii Play Motion, partly for a sexy red controller to match our sexy red classic controller but also to finally get on the Wii Motion train almost two years after it came out, now that Zelda makes the accessory worth owning. Before, this list didn't seem to justify the purchase. We were big fans of Wii Play especially Tanks!, in fact we think there are only 41 games better than it in existence . So we were quite looking forward to Wii Play Motion. Don't get us wrong there are some rum games in the pack and the experience is severely hampered if you don't have more than one Wii Motion Plus controller. Sometimes rather unnecessarily, a number of the games could easily have been pass the controller multiplayer. However, Star Shuttle is phenomenal and we wish there was

I mentioned earlier in the year playing Ocarina Of Time in HD  And I have been, And also enjoying it! But over the holiday's I have been dabbling with other HD projects. Firstly after completing Skyrim at level 72 *Bragging rights* I had a been bitten by the Elder Scrolls bug and decided to have a looksee at Morrowind and the improvement Mods: As you can see it's very pretty, on top of this though there were mods to enhance the models, and the clothing and such, it was comparable, if not better than Oblivion Graphics. However the controls and interface were dire, I was hoping to approach it with the same controls as Oblivion/Skyrim. but it is really optimised for Keyboard and Mouse. Secondly, while playing Ocarina of Time I found myself feeling nostalgic, and remembered playing FF7 around the same time. So I decided to have a look into HD mods for FF7 (skip the intro): as you can see the silly models on the world have gone, in general most graphics have be

There is a fantastic piece on video-game addiction floating about the internet, describing evolutionary reasons fro addiction, and more importantly discussing "Unethical Game Design". The tricks that developers use to trap the user into wanting to come back for more. A very thought provoking piece, check it out here or here: It's only 15 mins... c'mon. Love and Obscure Skyrim memes, Richie X.

Quite! Screenie from the excellent Syberia.

Oh gosh... I dunno if it counts as an addition to out sister blog: Dinosaurs in Games GRIMLOCK!!! Love and inappropriate indie music, Richie X

I did promise you all an update, but I was a little busy with killing Draugr, Dwarven Spheres, Falmer and "talking" to dragons. i.e. Playing Skyrim. If anyone out there cares for my character I have maxed out Archery, Sneak, Enchanting, Alchemy and Smithing, purely to get maximum damage on my bow. So what have I done? Well I fucked about at the start, pretty much the moment I could wander about, I did some random dungeons, joined the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild. I did a touch more of the main plot, then did the Mages guild, I still have the companions and the rest of the main plot to do. How about the game in hindsight now? Well It's great, it's not too buggy, though there are some annoying bugs, which has kinda halted my sidequests, so now I play the waiting game for the patch. What I am most disappointed about is the "Guilds" quests, Dark Brotherhood and Mages Guild was over so quickly, I have spent more time faffing about in other dungeons

Are mobile games any good yet? Are they even proper games? For dinosaur games no definitely not . Chuff_72 continues to look at mobile games and work out if they are any good yet here's his skinny on Infinity Blade 2 .   Infinity Blade 2, in my opinion, is the sequel to Infinity Blade, and it’s a good one.   I'm fairly certain I completed the first game, where *SPOILERS* you defeat the End Boss *END SPOILERS*, however at the start of this one he is not dead, I guess that's standard for an Immortal… I'm not sure why we all thought he was dead, he clearly states he is Immortal a number of times, so yeah, not unexpected. The original ended on a cliff-hanger of sorts, and there was a cool "hidden" ending. This time there is a new random woman, the main guy has gained a name and a voice and then he dies, only to wake up in a metal cave/room, wearing only his pants.   While the game does seem to just chuck you in head first apparently there is a whole n

Out-fucking-rageous. This advert is on the actual telly-vision. Except unlike the version in that link it carries the disclaimer along the lines of "visionary applications only".  Basically, Microsoft have created an advert for the Kinect, yet another advert featuring a chilled out version of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?", showing a whole host of things that might be possible in the future using Kinect but which aren't at the moment.  Amazing new low from MS when it comes to Kinect. Can't sell any when you show what you can actually do with it today? Then hypothesize about the future. When the product might be useful. I think more ads should be like this one. Fuck four wheeled cars, just advertise flying cars with the disclaimer "made-up future bullshit in no way reflects existing product". Tobacco companies should advertise non-existent anti-cancer medicines to allow us to smoke as much as we like. Just occasionally take an "n

Its not often we do a serious article, you know, about real things... But this is something I have had a lot of experience with. And would like to share a few gripes and annoyances with the Industry, specifically "Quality" assurance. Hey there little man, do you like computer games? Well clearly getting a job in the games industry makes sense that way all your n00b-pwning skills you have accumulated wont go to waste; they are now "experience". So how could you get in the industry? Programming? Nope. that involves a course which takes 3 years, by which time the language you have learned may be defunct. 3D Modelling? Again nope, more course work, and an Art degree... Games Design, Yeah why not, you have played so many games, you know what makes a good game  you could write an epic RPG, or create the next 3rd person hack n' slash hit. Oh no, wait, you have to spend more years doing a course on how to design games, which are ultimately, bested in gameplay buy ind

THIS IS GOING BADLY . STUPID FUCKING MEME .

Another quickie. Is it me or is this game even out yet for the consoles? Telltale's site isn't helpful. Nothing in GAME or HMV. Amazon don't seem to have it. Xbox isn't promoting it very well. Nothing on the official PlayStation site. UPDATE: Ah ha apparently it has been delayed for the Xbox in Europe. Maybe Telltale should have that on their fucking website ? That's how you do retail apparently. Pissing off the one person who actually might tolerate your piss poor QTE game. ANOTHER UPDATE: Too late! I watched most of it on Youtube. Sorry guys you lost a sale.

Soz everybody, we've been mired in Dinosaur games of late . Just stopping by, checking we haven't been burgled. Oh and there's two things you should read. There's probably an easier way of flagging these links but it'll require signing up to a thing and then a thing. So just click the links kay? First up, this discussion from EDGE about game art. It makes all the points we clumsily try to communicate when the "Are games art" discussion comes up before the conversation gets hi-jacked by idiots thinking they know what art is and isn't. Second up, what is wrong with the video game BAFTAs . There's a lot wrong with them, some of it is what Ste says in the article. But we all know that indie games are boring anyway. On a more serious note, "Games" are so huge that there's no point in trying to group them together for awards. Who are the awards for too? They certainly don't seem to be for me . Stay safe kiddlewinks.

3D is great right? Everything is just better in 3D. Including Omastar Comics! Prepare to have your eyes close down knowing that they won't ever see a finer thing after you read this new Omastar Comic. NOW IN 3D. Does not get better than that people makes you think how we ever put up with all those 2D omastar comics right? We might as well call it a day here.

Wiiware has demos, Wiiware doesn't have demos. Wiiware sorta has demos but there are none avaialable. Wiiware has demos of weird games. We keep out eye on demos that sometimes get put up on the Nintendo channel. Sometimes we download the demos. We then play an excellent mini game called "juggle the channel data" where we try to free up enough space in the Wii memory to be able to play the demo just downloaded onto the SD card. We try to do it in as few moves possible, leaving the minimum amount of free blocks spare on the Wii. Right now as we type you can download the demo of Fast: Racing League , Kyotokei and some micro racers game. We downloaded Kyotokei. First impressions aren't great. It looks like an amateur webcomicist did the characters. Erk. The music is also annoying. Not a good start. The game itself is quite cool. I don't know how original the concept is but it is basically a side scrolling shooter but you can change the colour of your guy riding a bir

So i did my first dungeon, found the first side quest i could do and ran there and started opening chests and killing bad-men. Its oblivion again!!!! Well that's it for now. Further updates in the next few weeks on this game. Love and Golden Claws, Richie X

Ding! Levelled up! Took my first "perk" in Archery, oh I see Skyrim is using the perk system from Fallout... Though i worry did i choose well?!?!? Love and hastily chosen perks, Richie X

So here is my little badass. Love and Off to the block with you, Richie X

Oh yeah, fuck remembrance day! Today is Skyrim-day! Right now I'm installing that bad boy ready to launch into it, expect updates today.... Love and the only reason I'll be silent at 11am is because I'm so engrossed in character creation, Richie X

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. WE'VE ABUSED ALL CAPS TOO MUCH IN THE PAST, THIS TIME WE MEAN IT. The Official pokemon website is running a vote for a pokemon that will be featured as a download via the Pokemon Global Link. It is clear that TGAM are poke addicts but it ain't all rosy . This could change everything. Here are the current rankings of pokemon people have been voting for: For the love of god Pokemon players. VOTE FOR DEOXYS! Deoxys has never been available in the UK. The empty spot in my almost living pokedex drives me crazy. It is a constant source of dismay to me and the people around me. Whoever the fuck is voting for ditto and pikachu needs euthanising straight away. Not metaphorical euthanising, deliberate hunting down, slaying dissecting and grotesquely displayed in public areas as a warning to others. As for the people voting for Arceus, sure, it is a nice third choice but there was an event for it a while ago. You missed out. Sorry guys. VOTE DEOXYS. For all that is

Two MCV links in as many days. Good on ya MCV, no doubt our publicity (we are the second greatest video game blog in all of existence as proved by science, probably the firs now as Harvind1 has seemingly gone offline) will give them a numbers boost. This interview with Ralph Baer over at the Salt Lake City Tribune has him bemoaning modern video games. MCV ran with the quote: “I think it’s a disgrace,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “What I created got abominated.” Now when we aren't not whinging , we often are whinging but Ralph doesn't feel the need (or it wasn't reported) quite what he finds disgraceful. Tom Nook's prices and stock rotation? The outrageous camping that goes on in Team Fortress 2? Nauseating DRM? Too many busty women in games? Not enough women working in games? The Water Temple in OoT? The fact that Rogue Squadron 2 boots you all the way back to the menu screen every time you fail a mission? That no other video game does water better than Baldur'

We whinge too much. One of the things we whinge about is how game retailers don't seem to be able to distinguish their mid arm ginglymus from their midrectum aperture when it comes to the business of selling games. In the immortal words of Chief Brian Irons, whose hobby used to be taxidermy "BUT NO LONGER". We're so happy we even busted out a de-motivational poster and a Resident Evil 2 quote just like it were 2005 all over again. MCV talk to Robert Hennessy, John Lewis' new games buyer and he be talking a whole lotta sense. Including a Nintendo Shop at John Lewis' flagship store, just around the corner from the hit-and-miss flagship GAME store. In a word, FUCK YES and in more words ABOUT TIME.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is out very very soon. It'll no doubt sell well, there may be news stories about how many millions of pounds people shirking their day at work to play it will cost the economy. We however, could not care about one of gaming's biggest annual events. Way back when, we were fans of Call of Duty, Brothers in Arms and Medal of Honour. The historical focus appealed to us. This was when FPS still worked off the Doom format. There was shooting to be done, "keycards" to be found, missions to be completed and if that wasn't enough the couch co-op wasn't too bad. Things changed with this: Showing its' age now, astonishing how much things have changed since 2002. I remember the first time I played through this, my mind was blown. It was unlike any experience I had in gaming before, incredibly exciting and powerful especially given the basis of this level on real events of the D-day landing. On a second and third playthrough however, it i

So I did it, I got the full 1400GP for LA. Noire. And as such I'm gonna do a retrospective review of this game. First Up, the game is not that hard, in fact it is so easy that you can actually choose to skip all the action and driving sections. However from an achievement point of view; the game is long winded, and honestly some of the achievements feel very tacked on. For instance, one achievement is to drive all 95 vehicles in the game. Now, if you have ever seen the game you could identify, a taxi, a police car and a bus, but every other fucking vehicle in that game is either a) a car , or b) a convertible car . Trying to differentiate those cars was a bitch and racked me up some youtube time, and annoyingly one car actually does not spawn anywhere in the game, the only way to get it is during a case and you walk out into a parking lot, when you are not meant to... Another horrible tacked on achievement was the hidden packages one... Fifty Hidden packages all round the map, an

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

It starts! Batteries, check. Wii check. Component cable showing green? No. Sort of? Eventually fixed. We're in. To start press A+B. Why. Why not A or B? Save file has been created. Pretty interesting stuff so far. Choose name- Dink. Winner. Dink and Apony. Epic adventures. Water is not as good as Baldur's Gate (better than Wow though). Spirits. Talking about spirits. There's a man with a moon face. It's tough. We're in Hyrule again. We know that much. TRIVIA: The first horse you see doesn't have a penis. We were both looking for it too. Ugh Goat herding. Squirrels. Red colour's gone looks like Gears now. Games been paused to sort out the issue with the colour red. Tits! She's washed our penisless horse. Discussion about whether Dink is mute or not. Sex of Apony confirmed by tits. We have to play an instrument already. This is one of the things we hate about LoZ. On the upside we're riding a horse. Apony to be specific. We've herded some goats an

This is not the exciting exclusive announcement we announced in yesterday's announcement announcement . Last week we were grumble grumble grumble grots about the new Legend of Zelda game. This is not fitting of the World's Second Greatest Video Game Blog of all time as proved by SCIENCE . So we're going to man up and give it a shot. We're comfortable enough in our sexualities to admit when we may have been hasty or wrong. In fact, I might really enjoy throwing boomerangs or throwing those pathetic little bombs about? This evening, along with fellow LoZ hater and extremely occassional contributor Chuff_72 we've decided to give Legend of Zelda Twiglet Princess a go. It is only fair. Apparently, this lady is in it? Why doesn't she wear shoes? We might even live blog it. We say 'might' because we might not get past the first five minutes if Link insists on making that horrible noise he makes. Then that wouldn't make for a great blog at all.

PREVIEW: EXCLUSIVE: We've got an announcement to make: at some point in the future we will be announcing something. Maybe a countdown clock. Maybe we'll finish our TGAM top 50 ultimate TGAM top games best list of best games of all time ever , maybe we'll announce another gaming celebrity ? Stay tuned to our constant stream of announcement announcements through all of those social networking sites you are on!