That guy's a Maniac...

#GamerGate continues to tear the gaming community apart. Brothers and sisters fight. But there's a shining light. Writing letters to end the hate, harassment and nastiness that haunts our hobby. Theoretical game developers and community managers wrote their letter  and gamers have their petition  but as a community, video game journalists have not yet spoken out as a group. Until next week that is. An anonymous source who wants to remain anonymous sent us this letter which will be going out next week.  Dear Gamers (R.I.P) Please stop the hate. The only thing we have is the power of our opinion on games and gaming related things and if you don't like that then we don't get paid. Well a lot of us don't get properly paid in the first place. In fact being a games journalist sucks. We should really do something to improve our plight. Anyways. If games journalists stop writing are we not just gamers? Please stop the hate. Signed 7 of 9 Albert Brooks Andre

We've burned out bridges with GAME . We tried but they've been failing us as consumers for the last half decade. Probably longer if we could be bothered to dredge through the archives. However, I happened to pop in to one today just to check. One in central London, the capital city of the United States of England. Here's what I saw: The store is now divided in half. One half if PS4, the other half is Xbone. I didn't spot the Wii games and the 3DS section only had five different new games and a pre-owned section chock full of absolute shite shovelware.  This last week neither the PS4 or the Xbone demo terminals have been working. Great showcase of that expensive new exciting next generation right? No new copies of GTA V. Pre-owned only. In the ten minutes I was there two people asked for it one didn't want pre-owned and the other one begrudgingly bought one. But it is 3 months old now so it's basically a legacy game. Why would they sell it.  No Xbones in

So despite GAME disappearing, our local store has curiously reopened (so that's why the lights were on 24/7 for the whole six months it was closed). A couple of weeks ago my better half was away for a few days so I conspired to waste my money on a game and revel in it until she returned. I could hide the game in the cupboard of things I have to keep in storage because they give out the wrong message to visitors when they visit the house tm. Despite giving up on GAME numerous times I was on a time sensitive mission. I needed a silly game, it had only just come out and I couldn't wait for online delivery. On an unrelated note here is a play I just penned called Some Things Never Change Some Things Never Change By Cunzy1 1 A HANDSOME MAN who looks very well hung and charasmatic and could pass for early-mid twenties walks into a GAME store. He wanders around the store with intent and eventually queues up for the till whilst a MORON is trading in 50 copies of Fifa to a

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

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

So around the start of February there was as a bunch of releases I was getting hyped* up about but now... a few weeks later... I couldn't care less. Game sites seem to have ignored their release even happened. No news except meta-reviews with the odd smattering of DLC rumours. I mean I know that games are considered nothing more than interactive entertainment mediums, akin to movies, but with more button presses (dependant on DVD extras). But I'm a little sad that for the first time, I have not given into hype, and I seem nonchalant about the whole thing. Maybe I didn't want FFXIII-2 or Soul Calibur V? Maybe, games are not worth the hype. Maybe the whole system is wrong! rant... should have continuous promotion... ramble... accessibility to all games ever made... rant... But that won't change, this is the machine we all made, hyped up media bombs, based on demographics and trends. Defining people by terms and desirability to play a game. Love and di

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

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