That guy's a Maniac...

No thanks to our interview five years ago . We remained true. STILL A SHALLOW GAME THOUGH. In other news. Hey, hey remember Resident Evil? That was pretty cool right? In Raccoon City and stuff and and the one in Spain with the non zombies. That was pretty cool. Hey you remember when, like the only thing that would make Resident Evil better was loads of shitty dialogue that actually takes itself seriously and generic S.A.S bullshit and ziplines and helicopters and terrorists and all that boring generic military crap that nobody finds cool? No. We don't either .

Earlier today I picked up a copy of Ready Player One. A little bit less earlier today I put it down. Finished. It's a really great book. Okay, so the set-up is a little flawed to engineer characters fourty years in the future with the geek sensibilities of a 2011 late-twenties-early thirties geek but it's forgivable. This book gives hope to geeks everywhere who may take solace in a scenario (albeit fictional) that actually makes use of all that knowledge of books, films and games that we have to save the world.

In today's Observer Carole Cadwalladr (who?) writes part of her column on the interesting statistic that wikipedia is a very mael dominated site. Fair enough. She then however, equates this to men controlling human knowledge (wikipedia's version of it). Pathetically she compares the word count on the page for menstruation against Star Trek and gender inequality against William Shatner. Something Awful have been covering the patheticness of wikipedians for a long time and to be frank, a lot better than award winning Carole's attempt. To look at these statistics and come to the pithy conclusions she does and to try to equate this to equality is special pleading of the kind reserved for Sunday newspaper columnists struggling to make up the word count for their articles. Wikipedia is written by volunteers. Draw conclusions about what men do with their free time as compared to women (shopping? being duped by cosmetic adverts? shoes?), fine. But men controlling knowledg

AI in video games is often an oxymoron. Developers will boast about their superior AI and in the days when games came in boxes you might even seen it as a bulletpoint on the back- Most advanced AI ever! Yet with sad predictability chances are within ten minutes of playing you'll see a man with a gun take cover on the wrong side of a sand bag or take time out of the hell-on-earth battlefront to inspect a wall for ten minutes. One of our favourite moments of AI failure was when playing the original Red Faction on the PlayStation 2 (maybe?). The last remaining guard in a unit of 6 claimed to have us surrounded. Surely, you can program a guy to not come out with that particular sound bite when he is the only one in the room no? However, FPS AI is the drooling propellor hatted idiot when compared to thinking men's games, particularly RTSs. Recently, I was bested on a map on "retro" game Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. The map was Point Stormy if you know it. Image from Wars

So a while ago I was really excited about Marvel vs Capcom 3. After completing it a couple of times I grew tired of it, after pondering why, given that I love the characters and also Capcom games, I think it was just shallow. Short of a ladder to fight over and over and some unlocks, which are either crappy gallery things, or the hidden characters, which can be gotten in a couple of hours. In short, completed it once, unlocked the characters, and that was me done with it. Then Mortal Kombat came along. I had been a fan of the original Mortal Kombat since disk swapping it on the Amiga. Though I ignored many of the 3D iterations, MK4, Armageddon and Deception. The latest Mortal Kombat is great! Primarily because they brought back all the retro fighters and moves, but also because it had more depth than MvC3! I'm going to say it, Marvel versus Capcom 3 is a shallow game! Mortal Kombat has over 300 challenges, story mode, and some worthy alternate costumes to unlock. The onlin

Yes people with astonishing predictability at least one newspaper is saying the riots in London are inspired by GTA. First of all this is idiotic. GTAIV is now three years old. Secondly, you can't 'riot' in GTA. Almost as soon as you set something on fire, the fire engines turn up and the police show godlike tenacity and initiative when you start a crime spree. Perhaps we should get our police officers and firemen to play GTA and it might inspire them to be more effective? Secondly, this is yet another example of sloppy reporting by the media. These riots were clearly inspired by 1999's Urban chaos, where gangs take to the streets to fuck things up and: The 2002 game State of Emergency. And look! It's by Rockstar, the same purveyors of such filth as Bully, GTA, Table Tennis and Manhunt. Do your fucking research you lazy media cunts.

Xenoblade Chronicles. Here be the trailer. What's not to love? It's got more than a little bit of Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers about it, two games which I like a lot. Talking to a couple of gaming pals about it, their response has been "since when did you like JRPGs?". A fair question. I don't and I don't normally like games with Xeno in the title. But I do like big open games with a sense of environment and it looks like great care has been taken over the setting. Finally! A game I'm actually excited about. Let's hope it doesn't dissappoint.