That guy's a Maniac...

For the Wii.Thoughts in roughly chronological order: I love Agatha Christie. She was genius, I hope Nintendo release a 100 Agatha Christie books on the DS. That would be sweet. Oh shit man murder mystery. Who is gonna die first? Sailor Boys indeed. It's the Butler. Cheese? What do I do with cheese? I hope nobody notices I am stealing everything from this house. It's Vera. Vera is hot. Glad I didn't miss that. It's Emily. Blore sounds like 'Boner' It's Boner. Stupid Wiimote safe cracking. GODDAM STUPID WIIMOTE SAFE CRACKING. Oh, wrong code. Goddam AWE and your crashes. Everygame. And again. And again. I should save more. It's the Judge! WHY WON'T EARRING MIX WITH CHEESE? Goats. Goats like cheese? Goats like apples? Goats like honey? Goats like buckets? Goats like cocktail shakers? Goats like books about bird watching? What do goats like? GODDAM AWE GLITCHES SHOULD SAVE MORE OFTEN. Not a glitch actually. It's the Doctor. Goats like walking st

There's nothing happening in games at the moment. Except for Resident Evil 5 and Dead Rising Chop til you Drop. Everyone else is getting fired. Here's a round up of the top stories this week: 1) I played a bit of Animal Crossing: Let's got to the city. I didn't go to the city, I failed to make a snowman and I only found two pitfall seeds (no fossils). The town was pretty weedilicious too. I did buy the common painting from nook though. I also got a very disturbing letter (screenies later). 2) Dead Rising Chop til you Drop is allegedly out on Friday!? How can this be? We're looking forward to it. I say we I mean I. Richie died a couple of months ago [reminds me, I need to do an obituary post] and didn't 'get' the original one. We (I) am sad that there won't be any photography as there was nothing better than accidentally whipping out the camera and taking a sneaky photo only to find some secret erotica. We (I) are not very bothered about the reduced n

Ten ways to beat the recession if you are a gamer: 1) Play all those games you haven't completed yet. This will probably see you through until 2010. 2) Laugh at your friends who spent their money on houses, cars and children instead of games. Your games haven't devalued over time, in fact with the current glut of mediocre games and sequels they may even have grown better with time. Your games won't leave you and take your children because you can't afford the lavish house and expensive food bills anymore. That's why games are great and real people selfish and 'orrible. 3) Invite all your friends who are saving money by not going out to trendy bars, clubs and to foreign countries for holidays over to your house for some mashed sessions. Show them that gaming has been valuable all along not just when you don't have anything else going on. 4) Pick up some cheap games that real people are desperately selling on Ebay. All those real people who bought a

Two 'interesting' articles went up this week Why are black game characters failing audience on EDGE and Resident Evil 5 Coverage Reignites Racism Debate up on some shit blog we found. It appears that discussion about racism, race and games once again rears it's ugly head for do gooders to send their good thoughts out into the ether. However, this time around it is black history month and Resident Evil 5 demo is live so it's kinda topical. However, both of these posts completely gloss over the main meat of issues about race in games. We've all played the Resident Evil 5 demo by now and realised that there's nothing there really. Anyone wanting to single out things that they think are racist are overstretching a bit and any gamer who has been around a while can easily cite other games where the race scenario is reversed, irrelevant or ambiguous. And no one got the heeby jeebies then or had to try so hard to fight for race rights. On the internet. On a blog.

This public service notice relates to the use of the term "facepalm". The use of such a term is increasing in forums, on blogs and on those motivational poster images. The users of the term may wish to rethink using it as it is only really used by american people who spend more than two hours a day watching cartoon network. Here are some suggested alternatives to use to impress fellow children on the internet: Gosh that was really embarassing for that person. Whoops. Oh dear that was unfortunate that that thing happened to that guy and everyone saw it. Please help make the internet a cleaner, more respectable place so that alien archaeologists don't have to shift through so much shit when trying to work out whether or not humanity was all that or not.

Almost exactly a year ago, we started emailing tips to tips@kotaku.com for those of you who don't know, Kotaku is a gaming news site, probably the best one actually at least in terms of volume and frequency, not neccessarily consistency. Anyway the above email address is for Kotaku readers to email in tips or rumours so that Kotaku can copy and paste the post on their site with some insightful sentence of commentary from one of the editors, 80% of which are called Brian. From here the escapist and then EDGE copy and paste all their news. So, for the last year we've been emailing in 'tips' sometimes once a day, other times once a month. But we did get a rise out of Brian Crecente once before they presumably blocked any email we send to them anymore. Question is can you guess after which one we got a response? Answer is on the reverse. 1. Hot Tip If you look at the ground in Golden Eye on the N64 you run a tiny bit faster. 2. Another Hot Tip In the videogame

I'm not an MMORPG fan. This you may know and I'll say it upfront. Some of the stuff that happens in MMORPGs is interesting to read about and there are some creative folk who can spin a nice tale around something they experienced in an MMORPG. For me though the problem is that the worlds just aren't compelling enough. Okay, that isn't entirely correct, the worlds are compelling but as soon as you set foot in it the effect rapidly wears off. The cutscene generates excitement but then grinding and questing and PvE events etc. etc. work to make the game into some kind of numbers and skills drive. Nice if you like it, total immersion breaking if you don't know what you are signing up for in an MMORPG. Case in point? I recently had a look at WAR. It looked nice and everything (immersion breaking HUD aside). My friend (playing as a Magus) summoned his disk of Tzeentch, left the beautiful crystal cave he was in and then crested a hill to end up in the middle of an Elven for

Gone since September. Ha he been working hard? Doing research? Travelling the world and conversing with the interesting people he found therein? I am proud to reveal the answer in a rare email from the estranged co-author of this blog. Okay so playing Wow for some of it but not for 3 months surely? Oh okay so maybe one month. Anything else? Jesus Christ. Expansions work people is the lesson here. Some people are just happy in Wow I guess. Seriously though, I'm informed they are all level 70+. This is a lapse for him. Perhaps we should send over the big ass crane that winches WoW fatties from their bed to his house before he explodes. Thank god! A casual game. There's hope for her yet. RIP in Richie.

Is this article a joke that we are too stupid to get? For those of you too lazy to click the link it is an article on Next Gen, the home of EDGE online about paper advertisements in the American Press, "The Best and Worst New Game Ads". At first I thought it might be interesting if their were some godawful ones because we all know that game ads can be pretty shite because marketing people assume that games are only played by young men with violent tendencies. It isn't that though because all the ads are pretty standard. The "worst" isn't at all bad and the best is a bit generic. Then I thought maybe the analysis of the ads might be interesting. But it isn't that either. Here's the bit next to an ad for World in Conflict, the ad is a picture of the box and "Strategy Game of the Year" in big letters: The product has been well-known to this audience for some time. Half the page is devoted to the text “Strategy Game of the Year,” with a large