That guy's a Maniac...

It's been a while since the last instalment of this series about all the gaming kipple we've collected over the years that fills cupboards and boxes away from the disapproving glances of partners. We started this series with some stuff that predates our video gaming 'lifestyle' choice and now we jump to the latest additions to the collection, which we frequently get out and lick, these ADOWABLE Pokémon near field communication (NFC) figures, designed to be used with the Wii-U game pad. Following on from the outlandish success of the Skylander's series Ninty are trying to cash in with this technology. Simply, you pop one of these figures on your Wii-U game pad and they pop up on the screen in the latest Pokémon Rumble game, one of the lesser Pokémon spin-off series. No doubt about it, it's a cash in (in previous Pokémon rumble games a similar feat was achieved through simple passwords alone) but we're huge fans of My Pokémon Ranch (153 hours 'playing

Sick of hearing about the Xboxone and the PS4 through constant RUMOUR and drip, drip of unconfirmed screenshots of a next gen game taken with a shaky cam from a brown paper bag? Bored of the Official PlayStation magazine tweeting about the number of USB ports on the PS4? Tired of the never ending whine of fanboys who miss the good old days when you had to get cheat codes from the back of a mag and you could only play the latest games at your mates house on all those illegally ripped disks?  You want to hear the facts? You've come to the right place, because we my friends have a source. ON THE INSIDE. It's Alcamoth citizen from inside Xenoblade Chronicles . Here's what she has to say about next gen.  You heard it here first. EXCLUSIVE.

One thing we would like to add to this post : Is that while getting my ass handed to me by all those legendaries, I was able to experience the other side of the pokemon games. Namely what it felt like to be an NPC. All these over powered super speedy pokemon, and here was me with a fucking stunfisk. I felt the pain of those stupid fucking team rocket grunts, making their grandiose claims of world domination with a fucking level 9 Zubat. These comics know what I mean: VGCats Super Effective 63 VGCats Super Effective 64 Dorkly, the fate of all NPC Trainers Fuck 'em, now those NPC's will feel my wrath with a furious vengeance! Love and almost a Pulp Fiction quote, Richie X

Right now until Midnight on Monday, it's the 2013 Global Showdown International Pokémon tournament. For non-Pokémon aficionados, every now and then there are international tournaments that are run over Wi-fi. The tournament are broken into a number of categories depending upon the age information with your Pokémon game; Junior Division, Senior Division and Master Division for old farts like us.  Each tournament has an open registration period, places are normally limited to 50,000 (from a community of 3 million according to the Pokémon Global Link ) and tournament rules sometimes vary. For a short time the registered trainers can take part in as many battles as they wish winning and losing adding or taking away ranking points which everyone starts of with 1500 of. You get to register six Pokémon and then going into each battle you see the six Pokémon your opponent has, both of you choose three trying to weigh up the strategic combinations. This is the first International tour

Since all this business , Omastar is too busy for comics work it seems. He's now off trying to break into the West End. He'll be doing adverts for squid rings in six months. DON'T COME CRAWLING BACK HERE BECAUSE WE'RE DONE YOU UNGRATEFUL...  So here's the new star of Omastar comics, someone who the kids might actually recognise, in a comic that all of two people will get, not that there's really much of a joke here in the first place. As ever, you gotta click to embiginate. In other gaming news, we're so so bored of the three stories going round and round at the moment. Like the XbOne and PS4 aren't going to land with a splat rather than a parade of dinosaurs with fireworks coming out of them and as if the AAA vs Indie is actually a thing. If you can't make games that will keep you in the business, don't fucking bother. Until the PS2, DS and Wii conks out we're in no rush for 'next gen'. It's unbelievable. God. We're

So that ancient game Outcast has been marked for a remake, and some of the original Syndicate (Wars) guys have appealed to the kickstarter community to give them money to do so. I feel that this week the games industry just flicked through gog.com  and chose a couple of randoms. First of all! That Syndicate game, which is called Satellite Reign; dont get me wrong I'm excited about the appeal of a successor that is not an FPS, and it ties in nicely with my recent cries for a proper dystopian megalopolis type game. But I cant get round that video : those guys are really off-putting, just seeing them there pitching their idea on kickstarter, it really feels a bit too much like begging, sorry guys. Some other kickstarters have done well in advertising their products and appealing, mainly because they are mostly creative types, but this seems like guys out of their depth trying to learn how to do a sales pitch. Secondly why Outcast?! Outcast was a great game, for its time, it

Over a month ago now, we trailed this series and then in classic TGAM style ditched it . This series is our way of getting some extra value out of all that stuff we've collected over the years, most of it travelling direct from the shop into the cupboard of shame. In surveying the collection we were in two minds about where to start. Should we mix it up and start at the end with the latest kipple we picked up in the HMV and GAME closing sales? Maybe start in the middle during 'our golden age of gaming' when we actually had the time/the inclination to play video games with every available second? Or perhaps we should go deep into the cupboard of Chinese manufactured goods and dredge out the things that started it all? Well we guessed you' expect us to choose one of those so in an elaborate twist we went waaay back. BEFORE the beginning. Perhaps this is where it all started with, sadly, all I have left of a once magnificent but also deeply shameful collection of Games W

Last month was a hard time for me. In part I was overjoyed at the exposure thatguys.co.uk was getting with that Kill Screen article. However it was also a dark time, my Pokemon Black Cartridge got put in the washing machine corrupted. This cart contained many of the pokemon who were on a par with the length of time played and connection with that Omastar , so as I am sure you can appreciate the joy of being featured was ever so slightly tainted... As you can imagine, I was more than distraught. I considered trying to salvage my save using PC adaptors, or perhaps re-starting with a new save and using editors re-create my pokemon with their original stats. I could even send some of the “event” pokemon, those pokemon I queued for, or downloaded that are no longer available. That would be legit right, its not so cheaty is it? I decided against it, to follow on from the Omastar article there is an emotional attachment to these guys, if I were to re-create them what would I create

E3 is a constant disappointment to us. This year we didn't even make too much of an effort to absorb any of it until long after it had passed. It's explicitly been why despite our blog age taking over our mental age recently we've been underwhelmed into a shocked silence. One thing is clear though gaming no longer appears to be for us.  Now this isn't just the typical gamer reaction. We aren't the type to jump onto the forums and announce how we hate it all and we're boycotting it all and we're giving up (only to return in a week or two when out favourite license signs an exclusive deal). We're actually real life gamers. The gamers who don't seem to work in the industry, who don't seem to be heard by the industry and who don't have infinitely deep pockets.  Since before E3 the creeping sensation of all this not really being for us has crept in. How anyone can seriously talk about the PlayStation 3 as being a viable platform (or the

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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 '

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