That guy's a Maniac...

Part 1 is here. This may be why the Escapist continues to be so shit. Here be a few gems from the Reddit: Robomonkster in response to the escapist claiming the crunch has caused strain: How are they 'feeling the crunch' with that many fucking ads? Have they found the other end of the online ad-revenue bell-curve, where they spend more money on the bandwidth for them than the ads bring in? Amen to that even if I did have a desire to sift through their poorly designed website through all that crap to find some theoretical gems the constant ads would drive me away. As it is I try other ways of watching Zero Punctuation so i don't have to visit the site and get inundated with advertising before, after, above, below and around and content. Acid Super Sam : "I respect the Escapist" Nooooo ho ho. What kind of person says that. Why god why?

That see it rise above the crap that has outsold it. I recently completed it so it only took me just over a year . It's a really good game . We aren't good enough with words to express it. It's a great game even are there words to express better than great? Here are eight little touches that, for me, made it a really greatastic game and why my heart is made heavy with the knowledge that we won't see a game quite so beautifully crafted or surprisingly fresh for a long time. 1) Detail in everything . Everything from collectibles to the snippets that your civilians will offer up in conversation through to incidental details in the cutscenes draw the eye. It's all been lovingly crafted to reward players who will care to look for those tiny little details. 2) Naughtiness . Not as in, lame pre-watershed sex scenes or characters who stream cusses but genuine naughtiness. Citizens send you rude notes , perhaps my favourite of which is a letter rating the princesses (O

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.

I have holiday and I've been trying to bust as many games that I've half started as possible. Kirby's Epic Yarn A lovely little game that appeared quite easy to 100%. I was wrong. Clocked it in at just under 20 hours in the end. Stupidly, I left all the challenges until the end so the last hours or so was just burning through the repetitive and sometimes tricky challenges. Soundtrackwise, many of the new tracks are as sublime as the classic old tracks. Fun. Little King's Story I'd put Little King's Story on the back burner for a long time. Typically because when I play it I get sucked in so I don't attempt to play it unless I know I have time free. It's a game that still gives even late on where lesser games tend to add all the padding. It is also still challenging although I do end up restarting a lot because I'v become very attached to a little hunter of mine called Stella. She was one of my first citizens, she's married to a guard and has

That time of year again. Another stupid gaming awards ceremony. The problem with game awards is that they try to be like film awards but games don't really work like that. Let's have a look at the UltimateGOTY nominations: Sad face just doesn't cover it. Maybe the selection isn't that bad it's just well, this screenshot says everything doesn't it? Is this it? Is this what we'd be dreaming next generation was going to be delivering? Here's the same selection with sequels and remakes taken out. Two interesting but flawed games. Do that excercise again but only keeping PC games, or downloadable games or pah. Same old arguments. Unlike films, there are a bazillion games released every year and I know that my personal choices don't overlap with everybody's but there are a few outstanding issues. What's with the categories? Either have categories that work or just make em up. I know I'd never put Portal 2, Dead Rising 2 and Little Big Planet 2

You may have read this story last week about the tragic death of a 20 year old killed by deep vein thrombosis, supposedly from playing Halo online (ODST? Reach? The original?). You can predict how the rest of the story goes. The parents say they thought it was safe, Microsoft point to that small print that comes with their console, in the instruction booklet for every single game and even flashes up as a message in many games "Time to take a break kids". My initial response was that long stints of doing anything causes all kinds of medical problems but a friend pointed out that even if you were reading a book for twelve hours straight you'd move around more than if you were gaming. Nothing else exists like gaming to fix your attention so avidly. Dead arms, pins and needles and head rushes are par for the course for gamers and chillingly, this story reminded me of marathon sessions in my youth. Fortunately, necessity means I don't have time for hours and hours of play

Barry Burton nipples.

The only good thing about the Escapist has this to say: Gaming could be one of the most exciting new forms of storytelling in all media but you're all cancelling Pride & Prejudice to show the Friday night football. It's like being stuck at some excruciating wedding reception with a lot of extremely drunk and raucous relatives who are trying to get you to join in the conga. I do not have the same concepts of fun as you. I would not have a good time if I just let my hair down. Having to share physical space with squawking maiden aunts who still forward lolcats to each other makes me want to spit up my kidneys. Now bugger off and leave me to my cake. The whole post here . He's just specifically talking about stories in gaming but he could be talking about a lot of aspects of gaming.

We were discussing games we were playing the other day and as it transpired, neither of us had been playing games for 'fun' recently. Richie had been grinding a stupid achievement in Last Remnant and I'd been playing through Tatsunoko vs Capcom to get third and fourth costumes for characters I will never ever use. Also, some of the most vivid memories I have of games is ridiculous repetitive nonsense. I remember running in and out of the entrance to the Gold Saucer in Final Fantasy VII to a guy who trades one form of virtual money into another. Even worse was watching a friend dodge lightning bolts in Final Fantasy X. Capcom also brings on the pain in most of their titles, unlocking Tofu in Resident Evil 2 and getting the rocket launcher in Resident Evil. Me and my famly also spent hours and hours in the original Tomb Raider trying to get t his medipack. Turns out it was 'unreachable'. But I guess the question is, why do we do it? Are we having fun? Richie and I de

Please? As much as I'd love to buy one of the four OS CDs that were released in Japan it would be really nice if I could just get them off the disc. They are on the disc after all. Great thanks. IN RELATED NEWS. Sound tests. WTF? I do want to listen to the theme from Orbital Ring Systems Cargo Bay , a catchy little ditty from Tatsunoko vs Capcom but I had to steal music of the internet to make it happen. I would never ever have call to listen to the 34 different grunts that Alex makes in the game but sure, that's what you can do in the gallery. It makes no sense.

Round 2 of understanding gamerish (round one here ). Today we take on understanding scores out of ten. Many gamers lack a coherent framework for prolonged discussion of merits and downsides of commercial products. Combined with attention spans shortened by obligate internet use means that reviewers often use a simple one to ten scale, often at the bottom of a review to help the pressed for time gamers decide which game they should chip, rip or steal next. Unfortunately though rather than use the X/X system as a rough indicator of quality many gamers endlessly squabble over scores of their favourite games neglecting to notice that scores are merely one person's take on a game and that the reviewer's employer is probably a more important factor on what score that game gets than actual quality. Furthermore, many assume the one to ten scale to be a normal scale but it's actual more complicated than that . Here's how the gaming scale works. 0 - Not often used at all even for

I don't know how many other people spend a lot of time on the Wii's Nintendo Channel but it is a mine of useful information. Aside from hit and miss video uploads and video series that don't go beyond one or two videos, you can view records for virtually every Wii game released, including reviews by the people who play them. Players not only review the games they play (using a sliding scale) but they rate whether they think hardcore or casual gamers would appreciate the title and whether the game is best played alone or with friends. The number of times played and the average play time are also recorded. The Games Anyone can view this data by going to the Nintendo Channel and seeing All Recommendations. Unfortunately, the list that is brought up doesn't contain all reviewed titles and from what I can work out there may be some regional filtering. I can't work out why this is, the legend to the list describes the games as those currently available . However, No More

Thank. God. . Nobody likes Mega Man.

When we can't play games, read games or think about games in our head we find time to watch videos of games. Watching game vids is a tireless pursuit. For every fun and interesting video out there, there are hundreds of poorly edited, humourless, boring and idiotic videos. Here's what we've been watching recently. Two Best Friends Play. Yes games can be thought provoking, worrying, scary, addictive, intriguing and brilliant. A lot of the time though they are stupid and embarrassing. The tropes of games aren't something to be mourned though! it is where the source of fun can come from. In a world where online grimfest shooters seem to be how our community mostly interacts, Two Best Friends play reminds us of happier times of goofing around whilst playing games with your buddy on the couch. The video above is our favourite of the series but all the others are worth watching. Fail of the Weak We're big Halo fans here. Oh yeah, sure it's popular so lets rip into