Posts

Alien Resurrection

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Alien Resurrection for the PlayStation is fucking brilliant. The recent car crash that has been colonial marines has led many so called games journalists spout that there have never been any brilliant Alien games. Of course, because they were probably foetuses when many of them originally came out (and gamers who play older games are some sort of messed up because as a medium it's constantly improving unlike any other medium that has ever existed so any game released this week is obviously and by default better than last week's RANT CONTINUES HERE ). Alien Resurrection was one of the good ones. At the time, EDGE gave it a 9 and compared it to a GCSE in terms of how rock solid it was. I would link to that review except the EDGE website is awful and they haven't realised how uploading all their really good older content might get them some hits. However, it is rock solid and a bit scary even today . I've been stuck on the same section for over a decade. Every year

7 Years Later

Here's where it all began . Here's where it probably ends.

649 Mother Fuckers!

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We're a bit Pokémon upped a bit recently. It's our go to game and if we're playing it, it probably means there isn't much else out there at the moment and AMEN AIN'T THAT THE GODDAM TRUTH.      Two days a man called GARRETT gave me the greatest gift a person can give to another. He gave me a level 44 Tornadus. Fine, you might say. That's done on street corners the world over. Well. You'd be wrong fucker because this Tornadus was the 649th Pokémon for my pokedex. This is huge news. I finally 100% legit CAUGHT THEM ALL. They said it couldn't be done . But it is. What's that, you calling me an Internet liar? I ain't one of them Reddit sun bitches go tellin' lies of this magnitude just to sound cool. Here's the proof that couldn't have been replicated of falsified in any other way because them photos are in COLOUR.   It's been a trial and for the longest time it was darn near impossible to catch them all because those h

Xbox One: The facts.

The facts are, you read them elsewhere. Discounting the WiiU, our next next gen shall arrive this year. PS4 and Xbox One, The powerhouses of console hardware have entered the foray with media hub like set top boxes, with internetTV, social media integration, communications, and happen to also play games too. Don't get me wrong, the stats are amazing they will be delightful machines with future-proofed methods for maintaining the prettiness of games. However I think I am most saddened by the lack of back compatibility, I mean suddenly my 360 collection is now dedicated to the 360, and well we all know that the 360's are far from reliable. But what gets me is all those digital purchases, the arcade and digital download versions, they are simply now attached to my gamer tag, but will they be transferred over? It seems not, and the same goes for digital purchases on PSN (Heartbreaking if you just bought FFX/Kingdom Hearts). It just makes me think I would have been better payi

Game OS's enter Brand wars.

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The great brand wars of our age include: VHS versus betamax, Megadrive versus SNES and HD-DVD versus BluRay. But soon we are going to see a slew of budget "Android" platform devices. These devices are projected to be one of the next steps in gaming, budget range hardware to play mobile platform targeted games; I predict there will be another brand war. Don't get me wrong I am not condoning these devices, in fact my official standpoint on these Android devices is quite negative. They remind me of the 50-in-1 games "my first console" plastic abortions you could get in Argos. Further to this, it bothers me that the OS is a platform, consoles are a platform, they have traditionally had vast improvements budget-wise over a typical PC due to dedicated architecture, these android devices are just running a gimped version of linux on an underpowered PC. Despite all this it will more than likely succeed in the casual market all it needs is focused marketing iterat

Dystopian Nostalgia

Dystopia Noun An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. By Dystopian nostalgia, I actually mean I am nostalgic for the classic dystopian atmosphere created by the games of the 90's. The 90's did dystopian really well, with films like 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, Dark City, Terminator 2, Tank Girl, the influential series Aeon Flux, and the anime such as Ghost in the Shell and Akira. These all created hi-tech Sci-fi worlds, where capitalism/totalitarianism is the new world order and the masses are oppressed  90's games did dystopian. In fact a great deal of games at this time encapsulated the dystopian vibe. The early 90's had great story-driven titles like Syndicate/Syndicate wars, Chrono Trigger, or Beneath as Steel Sky. The late 90's with the advent of the original Sony PlayStation saw many titles encapsulating this dystopian atmosphere fore-mostly the introductory area of Final Fa

Omastar Comics #35

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Exciting news, Omastar Comics has been published in a hyper-limited-super-rare edition print run of one copy. And that one is ours. So, just look at these pictures I guess. Look and be jealous. Mwa ha ha ha! The first edition includes the first 33 comics (including two comics 26 and no comics 27). The second edition will cover the comics 34-66 so expect to see it published some time in 2018. Woo hoo! In the meantime here's Omastar Comics #35 back in the retro format.   That Omastar, he just wants to have his cake and eat it. All actions have consequences Omastar. We learned that lesson, the hard way from an episode of He-Man. Until next time Oma omastar!

Loading Bar: London

AKA: MADD Tucked away in the porniest part of soho in amongst the sleazy strip clubs, exuberant gay bars and depressing peep shows, there lay our nemesis: a pop-up version of   Loading bar . Years ago we came up with the idea of the games themed pub, then some fuckers did it. We just lay here writhing in our own jealousy . The problem with the Loading bar  is that it is miles away from anywhere, in Cornwall. To analogise this via the medium of Final Fantasy VII its like having a major metropolis like Midgar and putting the gaming pub on the island with the city of ancients. Or Zelda: Ocarina of Time... Its like having a major metropolis like Hyrule Castle/Village and having the pub in the Gerudo desert. In any case they spotted this and decided to put a pop-up version of the bar in London. In a creepily placed mango enthusiasts cafe? The interior was sad, tired and far from the hi-tech branded wonderland we had imagined.There was a counter with some cakes, an A3 sheet with some g

Silent Hill Revelation is not very good

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This image has very little to do with the film. Richie and I were supposed to be saving watching this for a girl's night in but now we live within 600 miles of each other we don't see each other half as much as we used to. So I caved and watched it and unfortunately I roped my better half into watching it. She'd sat through the first Silent Hill film and it had such an impact on her that halfway through the film she confessed that she thought Silent Hill was Hellraiser . In a way I was wishing it was too. This film is bad in a generic and inoffensive way delivering a double dose of cringe. One cringe for it just been a not very good film. Another cringe for it being yet another not very good movie adaptation of a video game. I've not checked the rankings recently but surely in the order of genres of film, video games adaptation must be down near the bottom of the list just below 'American TV dramas about big city people falling in love with a rural '

GDC 2013 Proposal

We submitted this proposal to GDC. Fingers crossed we get picked! Session Title : What about the consumers?   In the Business and Marketing Track. Session description   Video games we are told are an ever growing market and medium. So why is it that product windows for making a profit are six weeks after launch? Why do game studios continuously close and rise from the flames under a different name? Why don't developers demand more of their publishers? Why don't publishers demand more from the retailers? Why are developer websites horribly out of date? Why does the industry seem to do its best to ensure that the legacy of gaming is destroyed as it is created? Why was Deus Ex Human Revolution at a 75% discount six weeks after launch? Attendee takeaway This session will give attendees a ground level view of how the average consumer will, if you are lucky stumble upon the game you invested years of your life, blood, sweat and tears into. This presentation

Kotaku: Scraping the barrel

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Ok ok, I know we all hate Kotaku , hell even Kotaku hate Kotaku. I shouldn't even grace their hits with a link to their tired under-skilled gawker site. But sadly it occasionally fawns upon my radar, partly due to out-of-the-loop developer/publishers giving it credible news, thinking they are still the mainstream go-to gamer site from 6 years ago. But you gotta check this one out it has completely obliterated the line between irreverent and irrelevant. Its a post about how one Kotaku writer doesn't like Cheetos. That is all. Love and irreverent irrelevancy, Richie X

NextGen: A wishlist

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Its coming this year, whether we like it/are ready for it or not, the tidal wave of new technology, titles and marketing. For now we dabble in the foreplay of specs; as the industry giants stand before us hands on hip proudly dangling such numbers and technological acronyms as, 64 separate cores of GPU spinning many trillions of numbers every second or multiple Gigabytes of DDR5 doing what ever RAM does. Teasing us , leaving us salivating, moist with anticipation, gagging for more. But before we get down to it, we have expectations, its not how big the tech is, its what you do with it that counts. We have been burned before, so before we go all the way, we'd like to set some ground rules. Keep it pretty, there is little to no excuse now, most of this hardware is dedicated to prettiness and quick prettiness at that! You have the tech, set a bar and stick to it: no clipping/collision issues, no cheap grainy filters, no slow loading unreal textures, and lets keep NPCs proper

The Ideas Factory

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We're full of good ideas but lack the skill and will to see them to fruition. We're so charitable though, we're giving these away for free! If you're one of the 140,000 people who make video game videos and other video game content on the Internet, please make one of these. We don't want any credit beside the credit line (c) Thatguysamaniac, www.thatguys.co.uk all rights reserved.  1) The Hunk Umbrella GMV. Make it happen people, it's been six years already . Nobody wants to see your Final Fantasy videos. This is that the people want. 2) Capcom Cam. Like candid camera but with Capcom instead. This idea requires quite a big budget but should be a spoof current affairs show with only female panelists and talking heads. At the end of every show, they find out that the cameras have only been filming them above their knees and below their face.  Then Kenzo Tsujimoto pops up and says "Congratulations! You're on Capcom camera". Guaranteed hit

Mini Review- Slayin

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Chuff_72 is back. He's stranded on a isolated island somewhere and only has his mobile phone to play games on. He's been kind enough to wire his reviews over so we can laugh and point at mobile 'games'. They'll never be the future. This is Slayin (no “g”, no fucking apostrophe either, apparently RETRO means bad grammar too). Despite looking like shit it’s really enjoyable, and a cleverly condensed RPG in the mould of the infinite runner, because that little blue lump keeps on running, but only on one screen. If you run into stuff with your pointy thing they die, if they run into your back passage you lose a chunk of life. There is a jump button, it’s the massive grey button on the right. The controls (left, right, jump) work for once, which is cause for much rejoicing. During levels you can run into a shop and buy upgrades to keep you running, there are boss fights, and cheevos. It’s really good. That’s pretty much the review, below is all moani

From The Collection: Introduction

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There seems to be a lot of discussion at the moment about defining the language we use to describe gaming and more broadly defining the culture. One of the things we worry about here is how we preserve gaming. It's a medium we're still in the position to save most of but very little is being done to preserve it.  This recent Extra Credits video rather nicely sums up some of the major barriers to preserving the physical stuff of games. We aren't ardent institutionalists but we'd really like to see gaming museums seriously explore preserving and celebrating (museums are more than just historical archives). Museums have started to look at gaming and there have been a number of exhibitions on or incorporating gaming but to date there hasn't been an concentrated effort on displaying gaming for it's own sake. The Smithsonian exhibition The Art of Video Games and the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum were both good starts and both the Victoria Albert M

An Omastar Is For Life

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Meet Omastar, the (Oma) star of Omastar Comics and of twitter fame . You could say Omastar is my favourite Pokémon but you'd be wrong. My favourite Pokémon is Dactylocer, MY Omastar. let me explain. One of the wonderful and often overlooked features of the Pokémon series of games, including the main series of games and some of the spin offs, has been the ability to transfer Pokémon not just from one game to the next but most importantly from one generation to the next. This feature goes as far back as Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire . Pokémon were transferable from one game to the other in the Green, Blue, Red and Yellow games and these games were compatible with the Nintendo 64 Pokémon Stadium , and Pokémon Stadium 2 but sadly the Pokémon caught in these games couldn't be transferred beyond that. Since 2002's Ruby and Sapphire games it's been possible to transfer pocket monsters from one game to another up until the latest generation Pokémon Black Version 2

You Can Have My Steel

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We've been on a bonanza of buying older Wii games to add to the collection. We avoided the original Red Steel on account of the awful reviews but wanted to try Red Steel 2, partly because it's one of the few games to use Wii Motion Plus. We're about halfway through but feel it's enough to put down some thoughts about it. It's a perfectly functional if somewhat generic game. The motion controls irk at first, swordplay isn't mapped one to one to the Wiimote, the reason for this is so that a multitude of attacks can be mapped to flick, twisting, holding and tapping buttons in combinations with flails. After a couple of hours the controls become second nature and every enemy encounter can be played a number of different ways similar to the encounters in Resident Evil 4 . It's not quite mindless and if you aren't paying attention every enemy goon can take you out.  Oddly, the game  just sort of starts. There's very little in the way of introdu

Now Showing: Nintendo Channel LAST ORDERS AT THE BAR PLEASE

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MCV reports that Nintendo will be shutting down several Wii online services . Our heart skipped a beat for a second thinking that maybe the plug had been pulled on Monster Hunter Tri or Mario Kart Wii and our hunter might be trapped in subexcellent armour or our online ranking on MK might be forever frozen at a measly 8500 points. Fortunately, for the meantime, these games aren't affected but come the 28th of June Nintendo, News, Weather, Everybody Votes and Mii Contest Channels will be mothballed forever. Also going is the ability to send messages on the Wii Message Board This illustrates something that really pisses us off about modern consoles; increasingly the console and games you buy are really just a license to use services until such time as the servers are unplugged.  Now most people probably won't mourn the loss of these services but as this series has shown we thought they were pretty great albeit underused service. We've had some hands on time with New Su

Meloetta Get!

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Last weekend, once again we went through the humiliating ritual of busting down to the nearest GAME with our DSi and copies of Pokémon White and Pokémon Black Version 2 to download Legendary 'mon Meloetta. That takes us up to a sweet 648/649 (Deoxys aaargh) in our eternal mission to Catch 'em all , this generation of Pokémon is the closest we've come. In all our years of playing these ridiculous games, Nintendo seem to have finally realised that yes, Europe is a viable region and that some people do play their multi million selling game series. For previous generations we'd get shafted over special events and event only Pokémon meaning that unless you turned to an Action Replay you were destined to have to live with empty spaces dotting the pokedex. That's not to say that all regions are treated equally. Oh no. With Pokémon Black and White Version 2 there's now a multitude of ways to receive special gift pokémon and items from Mother Ninty. gifts

Sin and Punishment Do You Want Me To Call You A Cab?

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We recently picked up Sin & Punishment Successor to the Stars, Star Rod Sky Pirates Knights. Surprisingly, despite 3 years of rave reviews and fond reflections by everyone who ever played it, it is rather good. When we get a new game, we have a ritual. We pour over the instruction book first, reading the "plot" bit (which is still the place where most games actually describe the context of the world you're about to visit). Weirdly, the above image is in the instruction booklet illustrating the biography of Kachi one of the two playable characters. It appears she's hurriedly getting dressed, bra is out, one boot on. Fine. Maybe she's a ditsy character and her thing is always being late or something? We've not yet played through the whole game yet but this doesn't seem to be her deal.   It's just a weird image to use isn't it? I mean yes, please let us perve over the female characters at our own leisure just don't start the misogyny