That guy's a Maniac...

Yes we (I) did. If it's all part of LEGO's masterplan to get 20 somethings who grew up with lego to use their now disposable income to buy more LEGO after their Dad threw away all the original old LEGO whilst they we were away at "university" then it is working. Here's the story: I picked up a copy of Lego Star Wars II the other day. It was cheap in Morrisons and it was kind of my birthday (in a few days anyway) so I thought I would treat myself. I have the original one and seeing as we're not proper gamers here at Thatgirls anymore (thanks Giant Lego Hamstring Enemy) I wanted something to play to make me feel like I was being an accomplished gamer. Spontaneous review based on the first four levels: It's good. What you expect although the cantina could be more populated, especially with the old save characters. Also, it would have been nice to walk around the hub as your custom character but whatever it has multiplayer without having to go online,

What with being listed as an "industry link" over on RAMRAIDER and now knowing** the top Geometry Wars Galaxy player in the world surely this is the year of the maniac. And look!, Games Media Awards people, no ads so perhaps we should win the Best Commercial Non-Commercial Commercial Website Or Blog this year yeah? Yeah? Then we can finally give up our jobs packing battery chickens and write posts about Resident Evil full time! So without further ado, congratulations to DR Hamhock MD who by now must have been signed by Nintendo and is currently developing a Dr Hamhock limited edition Wiimote holder and/or DS stylus for mass release. Well done, you made it son*****, you made it. * By we I mean me. Cunzy1 1. Richie left the blog about two years ago and since then I've been dressing up as her and doing posts about dildonics and naruto. That was until Claire interrupted me when I had the Richie wig on and was posing in the mirror talking in a Scottish accent. I went

Sup maniacs? We were at GDC and we've had precious little blogging time so here's a brief catch up in the form of a numbered list: 1) The Guiness World Records: Gamer's Edition is now out (already reduced by 33% in many shops) and it is worth picking up in the future when it is somewhere around the £5 mark. Packed with a lot of tenuous records and inaccuracies but it's worth ignoring the blindingly obvious mistakes (Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 are not PlayStation2 games, why didn't anyone consult us?) to discover some lesser known gaming related gems. So for example, did you know that David Lynch directed the PS2 'Third Place' adverts? Or that the PSOne could connect to a number of Sony mobile phones? I don't know what they could do when they were connected but you could do it. In Japan. 2) Both myself and Richie have had our IPs banned from the Resident Evil Wiki for trying to add the articles "Jill Sammich" and "That G

Brain Training is racist against people who can't speak english properly . The BBC has the "story". And although we don't like to point any fingers if you can't say "Blue" then you shouldn't hope too much for your brain age or expect much from society at large really. Next week on the BBC: Employers racist against people who are not fit to do the job they are at interview for. Milk racist to people who can't drink milk because they are allergic or lactose intolerant. Sky racist against people who cannot fly. Video games racist against people who are not very good at video games. Touch screens racist against people who have no physical body through which to touch. Life saving medical surgery procedures racist against the dead and extinct. BBC racist against intelligent people who don't like lazy journalism churned out sensationalist shit.

Shit it like a polaroid picture. Props to Chuff_72 for showing me how Christmas is going to get even more expensive since this post . Yes that's right Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure for the DS. Advance apologies to my niece and nephew but it's another 11% towards my life dream. When you are my age you'll appreciate that I went for it. x x Review from the box art : Tricky. Very tricky. Could be amazing if done in an Endless Ocean kind of way. Probably going to be a bit dodge-modge kind of like a Tamagotchi but with even less functionality than eat, poo and sleep. COntains prehistoric monsters 9.5/10* *The use of the word "monsters" over extinct mesozoic marine fauna loses the 0.5 point

Video Game Music. The music of video games. Some of it is epic, some of it is very evocative and some of it is nausiating in the extreme . There are a lot of very active video game music "rearrangers", remixers and performers from the grand Video Games Lives concert , hit and miss OCremix , very raw soundclick to TGAM favourite Diversion (check the show every Thursday). From the weaboist of obscure JRPG music to the new tunes of Portal a vast swathe of it is shit. It is, don't pretend otherwise. Do you remember in the 90s where every game had an American "ROCK" soundtrack? Instantly forgotten by the next loading screen. And if video game music is mostly bad the remixes are even worse. The world does not need tinny electric guitar "rock" versions of the three notes in the chorus of the Hyrulian Field theme. There also seems to be a race to remix the dullest least memorable theme from the most obscure Japanese RPG. For god's sake just remix One Win

This week Omastar tells us about the time he fought racism, real racism, not the internet kind. Alas, that stupid kid getting in the way just as you were about to finish off the bad guy. That's how it always goes dude. ALWAYS

Right, so it has been reported that some company somewhere has bought to the rights to CryENGINE 2. CryENGINE 2 is some kind of HD games engine being used for crysis, we have all seen the photo of the guys head which is so detailed you can see the pock-marks on his cheeks. Anyways in today’s headlines it seems that the CryENGINE 2 has been licensed to another company, and this is the great thing, the company is called: Apparently all of their titles have a distinct Neanderthal them throughout. Ok, ok… I know they have the retarded American way of spelling “Palaeo” but I think they can be forgiven for the cool theme and idea for a company, getting the CryENGINE 2 Licence (whatever that is) and also finally for selling branded Palaeo entertainment rocks in their online shop. So cool. Laters, Richie

Well, Seeing that Cunzy aint here at the moment… I though I’d give you a “Dinosaurs in Video Games” update. Today’s game is Guitar hero 2. Yeah that’s right Guitar hero 2! I’m sure you are all asking yourselves, “Dinosaurs in guitar hero? How? Where ? As if!” Well they are and they are not… there are 2 separate references to Dinosaurs. First up we have the two player select screen: As you can see from the above picture it depicts: - A Mammoth - Sabre-toothed Tiger - Some crazy extinct Ungulate. (antelope looking thing) - An ancestor of the foxes - An emu-esque big-bird - Smaller mammals, cats etc. - A Fighter jet dropping a bomb on them all. When I first saw this I was admittedly shocked to see some obscure extinct animals just on a 2 player co-operative sceen. But then I realised that this may be a graphical representation of one of the songs, which brings me nicely onto the next instance of “Dinosaurs” in Guitar hero 2: One of the bonus tracks: Fall of Pangaea

If you are as nerdy as me, you have no doubt gone about the web and read a plethora of girl gamer blogs, sites that have four posts on them, (most of which are copy and paste Etsy rummages from the excellent Wonderland) the latest post is about four months old, the comments boxes are largely empty and the only thought out article is one about “There are no strong female characters in video games”. Today I’ll be arguing that this is a bogus statement. This argument isn’t new but the release of Super Princess Peach prompted a revival in the “computer games femmes are often portrayed as weak argument” by male and female gamers alike. Now it seems that any female gamer wanting to say something on the internets has to have written something like this in order to demonstrate that they really care or have something of worth to say about it. Personally, given the choice I will play as a female character most of the time. They tend to be more interesting and less generic than male chara

Yeah it's like the desert! I'm sad at not being part of what we could now call 'this gen' and I think that all the players have had an ample chance to win my, an avid gamer's, attention. I have been singly just utterly unimpressed by the PS3 post launch (we all know about pre-launch). Zelda, Wii Play and a dodgy not even tested fake online mode just don't justify spending that much ££££. Sorry guys you've had a while to get me onside but not convinced. Which means..... FTW. Why you say? Well it's actually online like the Dreamcast and the DS, it's got flagship next gen games that really do impress me, it's fun, I can play Gears or War, all the Dooms, no more wires, Dead Rising, the remaining members of Catch the Monkey B69 are always online, Dino Crisis 3, Bioshock, Oh and I absolutely love the achievements lists and the viral achievements (the six degree achievements where you get an award for playing someone who has played against bods fro

"News" from "this" week ] A nice report via boing boing about how most games are now old games. There have been an equal amount of PS3 and Wii consoles sold in space. Thatguy's a Maniac, the world's second best videogame blog of all time is nearly one year old! Check out under "events" to join in with the birthday bash. Hellbound Angels finally signing off. Or only one of them or something. Which I, er guess means that we won! New Gears of War clan TFU (The Fuckest Uppest ) are now top of the UK and US leaderboards . Well done boys and girls I knew we could do it. Nintendo announce another Gamecube remake exclusively for the Wii . Man I can't wait to play another game I've already played but with spacky controls. Everyone blogs about some shooting and videogames . Not us. We've taken the higher moral ground and gone for anime , anti- anime week. JOY FOR US! And that's how, for now. Catch you next w

Going back to earlier what about the other "minorities" that want a place to meet similar people who play videogames with a forum. The ladies have many places and so do gaymers but what about: 1) Blue Lilies- A blog and forum for gamers who like to play with blue avatars. 2) Dead Lilies- A blog and forum for gamers who have been, will be or are dead. 3) Wilting Lilies- A blog and forum for gamers who have no bones in their bodies. 4) Blooming Lilies- A blog and forum for adolescent male gamers who get the blame most of the time for all the ills of the internet and forums and MMORPGs even though they may not be to blame. For every sexist comment I see a gazillion adolescentist comment. 5) Lily Livers- A blog and forum for gamers who are but disembodied organs/aggregates. 6) Dino Lillies- A blog and forum for gamers who want to see more dinosaurs in games! 7) Black Lilies- A blog and forum for gamers with leprosy or frostbite. 8) No. I'm done. I've

So after something that happened on not the world's second greatest videogames blog , this not the world's second greatest videogames blog was set up. It's called guilded lilies and it's for women gamers and men gamers who might want to talk to women gamers and it's all about women and games. There is a forum and everything but it has to be stopped . This list explains why: 1) Their logo looks like one of these (!). That's a full stop not some kind of mole 2) The last bunch of people who got together to start a forum for women gamers ended up doing this: They blew up the frickin deathstar by employing their man robots. Stop the rebels! Save the Empire, queue the music Buh, buh, buh, ber, be der de de der. Der der der der de-der de de-deh. DEH, duh, DEH, duh der-rud-der-dud der der der de-rud-der-dud der der dum der der...........

... it is the taking part that counts. Following Richie's stream of posts in the last few weeks I thought I'd take the baton and do a post of my very own. Here it is. This weekend I was on the continent (what English people say when they go to 'Europe'. N.B. please don't refer to the English, Irish (or parts of), Welsh or Scots as 'British'. As far as I'm aware none of these countries wants to be associated with any of the others and the only time we might concede to being British is when England are knocked out of some sporting competition and we have to support one of the other British teams. Further N.B this only occurs when the English are knocked out. If Scotland, Wales or Ireland are knocked out of a competition they actively support whoever is opposing England). I won't worry you with the for whys but In one of the big electronics shops media markt I saw a site to behold- the videogames sections. Unlike GAME or HMV or Virgin or wherever, the

No, of course not. That's impossible but check this screenshot. Big Whoopdies I hear you cry but look at the big version. You see them? At the bottom there. AMMONITES. They could have been dinosaurs, granted, but ammonites are halfway there. This is from some game called LittleBigPlanet yada yada but it's all about the prehistoric organisms. Sony you have managed to fuck up a bit less. For those of you who don't believe me, or think they might be snails here is a zoom in using TGAM patented technology: