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Gender issues in Games

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So it seems from my all important viewpoint that a whole bunch of losers insist about worrying about gender in games the whole frickin time. "All girl characters in games just look hot or cry except when they are big and fat ". And someone will whinge about it if they are all, any or either of the above. So what? Get over it. Male characters have a raw deal in games. So there. All genders get a raw deal when depicted in games. But that's no surprise the same is true in children's drawings, advertising and every other medium ever. Street signs have better narratives than most games the only good thing games have is shiny graphics and a distraction from daily life or news of stabbings, economic crash, climate change. Do not look to games as a fulcrum in your hack paper on gender in games. I mean you Terra Nova . No. The losers mentioned above use their internet moaning like a horde of "liberal" zombies to skirt around the real gender issue in games. This

Exclusive Fable 2 Review

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P.S. Fable 2 is just Fable with a dog. Richie.

Impressions.

This weekend I had a chance to catch up with two new games on the Xbox 360, the alleged "real console". Saying that will make PS3 owners scoff, Wii owners laugh in their gazillions and PC owners head straight to their favourite forum to rat me out for the console loving luddite they expect me to be. Turning on the spot is over rated any case. Anyway, as we are in the midst of the winter of good games after the seemingly eternal summer of absolutely shit games I was anxious to try out two of the games I was particularly looking forward to. Gears of War 2. DANGER DANGER! SPOILERS IF YOU COULDN'T GUESS THE GIST ANYWAY Having enjoyed Gears of War after it came out and long after most Xbox 360 owners had changed their 20 second attention towards something else a little bit different (Does anyone even play Halo 3 anymore?) I was looking forward to the second one. I'd read a bit about it and Cliffy B spouting off about the story and it being, bigger and better etc. etc. The

We got another letter!

Dear Thatguys, Since you guys seem to be into survival horror, I was just wondering what you think of Silent Hill: Homecoming. And what do you guys make of Dead Space? Regards, Sherryluvr296. Well reader, thanks for your question, clearly you are an avid reader and saw our recent epic post on survival horror. Firstly nobody has actually managed to have a proper play at Silent Hill: Homecoming because yet once again, Europe sat at home quietly waiting by the phone for Konami to ring. They promised they would phone in mid-November, but no. We just get a text from our mutual friend Kotaku, saying that Konami is having a bit of a hard time and wont be able to meet up until at least Q1 of 2009. So we retire back to watching X-factor, crying softly into our knitting thinking about all the dizzying and sordid acts that America is currently doing to Konami's Silent Hill! In short, we are looking forward to it… Expect a review in 2009 along with us prising Konami for giving us some really

I lost my friends to WAR.

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Yeah, WAR. WAR is hell. What is it good for etc. All those cliches. Insert them all here! Well WAR is good for losing five friends. That's what it is good for. A bunch of my staple geek friends all got themselves playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, through a combination of relationships ending, boredom and geographical distance. Now they play it. A lot. (Un)fortunately, I am copied into all their emails so daily I get 145 emails which roughly broken down are: When we gonna meet up tonight, tomorrow, weekend (45%), what we did last night for those who couldn't make it (35%), hey guys I just read the wiki and we should.... (10%), microphone, PC, problems (10%). And dps jokes and all other acronyms which I couldn't care to google are the new order of the day. Just today I got sent this: LOLLERCAUST you will all no doubt agree. But do I despair? Nah. It's how MMORPGs work and the mix of my friends who now play WAR is testament to the tried

Garry's Mod

Click the title if you don't know what it is. It is a silly place with so much potential but it is rarely ever realised. For every 14,0098 awful videos like this this and this there may be one good video or idea. Concerned comics is one such idea as is this simple one stolen from here . The rest however, is a fetid mess. Like a child's bedroom. Banal, derivative nonsense. It is horrible to behold yet it is often followed by clammy sweaty palmed comments of "LOL" and "AWESOME" and it looks like they genuinely mean it. It's what games would be if fan service overwhelmed everything else. Glimpses into the psyche of these morons shows levels strewn with melons (LOL MELLONS) or with G-Man doing the retarded and cliched Gmod dance. What do I care though? I'm seventy going on dead but for you. You poor sorry souls. For you these people are your future . :( Indeed.

Chortle

Been playing a lot of SSBB recently and this video really struck a chord. Gotta love Captain Falcon even if you hate his games.

No Matter if you're Black or White

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As everyone knows by now Resident Evil 5 is coming to both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. This week capcom announced some of the DLC which will be available for specific versions. We've gots the lowdown here mofos: Xbox 360 1000mp Resident Evil 1 Rocket launcher. If you don’t purchase this then upon start up you are faced with the “you are dead” screen from the end of the PlayStation Resident Evil 1. Because there was no rocket launcher Chris died at the end of RE. Buying this content means that Chris didn’t die and you can play Resident Evil 5 as per usual. 450mp Training for Chris. After purchasing this content Chris can fire weapons and throw grenades without risk of hurting himself, fumbling reloads or turning the safety on and off. 200mp Lemsip for Chris. Upon purchasing this, Chris will stop occasionally sniffling or complaining about having a “stuffy head”. 300mp Zombies. Buying this content unlocks an extra zombie at the beginning of the second secti

Lets join that Bandwagon

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Yes! This seasons bandwagon is four player vs. lots of enemies jobbies. A couple of seasons ago it was vehicles in FPS and the season before it was war games set in Vietnam. Left 4 Dead, Horde mode in Gears of War 2 and the recently announced zombie mode in CoD:WaW have all recently been announced. Basically it's 4 player co-op vs. waves of things meaning players have to co-operate rather than fight against each other or be on each others teams but not really co-operate. Suspiciously, I should say, that these three games have all spontaneously come up with this idea. Is this innovation? Did we really have to wait until this gen to do these things? The answer to both of those questions is no. Basically, it's a bit of inspiration from Serious Sam, Timesplitters 2 Arcade challenges and virus mode and Project Eden mixed in with a bit of zombie love that has become the flavour of this dev cycle. Sure, it's a nice feature but we'll all be bored to death of it after th

When will blogger be working again?

Blogger is currently broken. Which means you can't see our brilliant yet succinct posts and we can't even upload images we stole from the internet to illustrate posts that you the reader cannot see anyway. Unless you can see this post and the two below it, with pictures in which case, it has been fixed. Ignore the above, the below and the on the same line(s) as this sentence. We're taking bets on when it will be fixed but unfortunately none of you will be able to bet by the very nature of the problem caused and the subject of the subsequent bet. Good luck! WHEN WILL BLOGGER BE FIXED?: 1-45 Never. 1 Five minutes before the world succumbs to some kind of apocalypse event resulting in the loss of electricity for 50 or so years. 100-1 October 2008. 5-1 November 2008. Place your bets now kids!

Survival Horror...

...It's a bit of a dead genre. Pun intended.

Joined up thinking

Kotaku has the scoop, but the news that Left 4 Dead will have the cheevo "Zombie Genocidest" whereby you have to wipeout 53,595 zombies (one more zombie than Dead Rising's Zombie Genocide achievement) makes us smile. Well done Valve, have a cookie. Let's just hope Capcom don't sue.

The State of Play

For all the imploring for games to become more mainstream and "accepted", for all the essays by pretentious hacks trying to read more into gaming than is necessary, for all the protests and for all the forum threads that go on for years about the best characters or the top ten...... For all the social and political commentators bigging up the merits of games for education and art. For all those and more it must be pretty galling to see that Pro Evo just knocked FIFA off the top sales spot. That's right, for all your whinging and whining about games the meatheads have it. The yearly update to a football game is what most real people are interested in. A game about a game where unnaturally shaven millionaires play football against each other. Unlucky.

*Sigh*

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This image from site we don't normally look at, Joystiq makes us sad. The top is the PS3 version and the bottom one is the Wii version. Looks like Sony tried to ruin it by making all the zombies grey like they're Solid Snake or something. Or a new PSN update or something. Or a sequel to Killzone or something. The Wii version looks terrible too. Too many zombies. I hope they scale that back before launch. Plus for all those Xbox 360 people laughing at other consoles only getting Dead Rising now at least we'll be able to read the fucking text man and it has multiplayer but they left that out of the press release. We have our sources though.

Omastar Comics #20

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According to the dictionary, apathy is worse than murder. At our recent book group, this issue came up and it was one that went right to the heart of our old friend Omastar. For years he toiled away in underwater caves thinking about how to cure apathy. He thought really hard. Somedays he would think so hard he would need to go for a swim or have a lay down in order to relax. Then, the cure came to him in a dream one night. We were lucky enough to be there on the scene when he cured the world of apathy thus bumping murder a little bit up the list of bad things. Here it is: Wow, that Omastar, what a guy.

Yes! TEKKEN 6

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Hi guys! We're going to take time out of our regularly updated TGAM top 50 ultimate TGAM top games best list of best games of all time ever to bring you this very very exciting news: It's bifs again! But not just bifs filth seekers it's Tekken 6 bifs. Tekken is a great game and for those young 'uns who don't remember it here is how the series went: Tekken 2: The series was so crazy it didn't even start at 1! Tekken 2 was a mashup of your favourite childhood toys, Lego, and your favourite beat em 'up game, Street Fighter. But it was better than Street Fighter because there was no fighting! There was never any contact, contestants just hit each other with neon fireworks until one of them gets tired or something. It was successful and on the PlayStation. Not even the PSOne yet! Tekken 3: This was Tekken 2 but with a cheaty character introduced to the series. Tekken 4: See Tekken 2. Tekken 5: See Tekken 3. Tekken 6: See Tekken 5 plus " swe

You are probably here looking for filth.

Yes you are aren't you? If you are the three people that came here yesterday looking for "soul calibur xxx" you probably want to go here or here . If you are the people desperate to find the "devil may cry 4 front mag" stuff you should go here . For the person looking for jay haffling, presumably Jay himself, go here . For the sicko who was looking for people with viagra naked, I would refine your search a bit first and the sad soul looking for porn guy blogger, we presume you didn't find them here. Disappointing people, disappointing. Where is the imagination? Where are the searches for Guy Cocker or Naked Bif ? We've got baby death and all kind of things to put into any orifice of choice . Boobs you want boobs? We got boobs in various flavours, WoW , Resident Evil Underboob (neathage) to mention but a mere few. We got spluff the biscuit going on too. You're not even googling terms like Red & White Bum Marmite and Green and bloody douche

Meatspace.

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You may ask when is a good time to use the word 'meatspace' instead of terms like 'the real world' of 'the physical world'. The answer is never, children, never. You never need to use it and any time you do, attractive girls and normal guys with jobs, cars, pensions and mortgages laugh at you and point at you and call you Urkel and do the things with the fingers to make glasses over their eyes. Then you'll probably make a webcomic where you kill the attractive girls and normal guys with a Buster sword and all your forum friends will send you emoticons until your inner balance is restored. You may also ask when is a good time to use the word 'meatspace' to refer to female nether regions. There isn't really a good time to use that word in that context either I am afraid. To reiterate, nobody should ever use the word meatspace. I have preemptively written to the OED to tell them to take meatspace out of their dictionaries or us and the lads

Why do you always find things in the last place you look?*

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*Is it because you stop looking or is it because the press coverage runs out?

Next-next gen? Hold up....

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Anyone (unlike us) with their finger on the pulse on video games these days might be excited with all the buzz around what the future holds for next--next gen. There's a new DS (no GBA slot!?), updates for the 360 and a host of expensive clip ons and add ons for the Wii. RUmours are also abound that Little Big Planet and Home might, you know, get released. You may be excited but were certainly aren't. What happened to last and this gen? The PS2 and the GBA, two fine formats still found in many many houses have been all but ditched commercially. Try it. Go to your nearest game shop and try to find some of the classics for these two formats. You probably won't find anything at all. If you are lucky you might find a copy of Okami or a battered copy of Pokemon Emerald in amongst the shovelware shit that Ubisoft insists on churning out for the all but abandoned platforms. And what for this gen? The choice for each platform is still hugely underwhelming, each consoles has a