That guy's a Maniac...

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

I have been messing about with windows 8 recently. Just to see its compatibility with older games and just the general feel of it. Windows 8 upon start up presents you with a slide-to-unlock screen akin to the Windows Phone, though entirely pointless if you are not using a touchscreen (though a simple tap of the space bar works just as well, if not faster) you are then presented with an "app" screen. Its not too dissimilar to the windows phone or 360 interface, and feels a little iOS too, though it's debatable as to whether this is a good thing on a desktop/laptop: As you can see this is your typical workspace, undoubtedly designed for a touchscreen interface. You have apps (which when clicked on/tapped expand into their own fullscreen versions) as you can see, there is an inbuilt twitter/RSS/Weather and the Facebook app "Socialite" doesn't work currently. Those with keen eyes will also see Final Fantasy VIII! Well I just dug out my old copy of it an

It's our first look at the Wii's Nintendo Channel in 2012 ( here is all the previous Now Showings). What will the hit-and-miss Nintendo channel bring this year? Our money is on- inconsistent videos, series that inexplicably end after one or two videos and in general poor use of an otherwise extremely well placed marketing tool. So what do we have? Bizarrely, Nintendo TV  the monthly show from the Official Nintendo Magazine, has been reset back to episode one again for the new year. There's now a woman presenter rather than that Welsh chap but sadly it seems the script writer hasn't changed. Expect cringey dad-joke "humour" in spades. One improvement in this awful ONM vehicle is that the episode is now divided up into different sections. Hopefully this means we won't get quite so many Mario/Zelda retrospectives/love letters. There's two tutorial videos up for Boom Street , Nintendo's odd Dragon Quest/Mushroom Kingdom/Monopoly game. The tra

We did a puzzle Back when we were excited about MvC3 we did an homage to Poison You know that regular piece we do? You know Unit of the Month? No? Crazy We realised Something We had too much free time We did a lengthy piece on "Digital Convergence" We predicted it  Black and White came out We decided we weren't  having fun We did an  Interview We lost something We invented the quadruple/triple inverted commas We joined the 3D fad Well that is it for this year, we'll be back in 2012 for the Mayan apocalypse, a million HD remakes and announcements of the next consoles? Abba said it best... Love and Next year we promise it'll be better, TGAM X

I was really struggling to recall any stand out gaming experience this year. There were plenty of polished experiences but nothing that particularly blew my mind. UNTIL LAST NIGHT! We treated ourself to Wii Play Motion, partly for a sexy red controller to match our sexy red classic controller but also to finally get on the Wii Motion train almost two years after it came out, now that Zelda makes the accessory worth owning. Before, this list didn't seem to justify the purchase. We were big fans of Wii Play especially Tanks!, in fact we think there are only 41 games better than it in existence . So we were quite looking forward to Wii Play Motion. Don't get us wrong there are some rum games in the pack and the experience is severely hampered if you don't have more than one Wii Motion Plus controller. Sometimes rather unnecessarily, a number of the games could easily have been pass the controller multiplayer. However, Star Shuttle is phenomenal and we wish there was

I mentioned earlier in the year playing Ocarina Of Time in HD  And I have been, And also enjoying it! But over the holiday's I have been dabbling with other HD projects. Firstly after completing Skyrim at level 72 *Bragging rights* I had a been bitten by the Elder Scrolls bug and decided to have a looksee at Morrowind and the improvement Mods: As you can see it's very pretty, on top of this though there were mods to enhance the models, and the clothing and such, it was comparable, if not better than Oblivion Graphics. However the controls and interface were dire, I was hoping to approach it with the same controls as Oblivion/Skyrim. but it is really optimised for Keyboard and Mouse. Secondly, while playing Ocarina of Time I found myself feeling nostalgic, and remembered playing FF7 around the same time. So I decided to have a look into HD mods for FF7 (skip the intro): as you can see the silly models on the world have gone, in general most graphics have be

There is a fantastic piece on video-game addiction floating about the internet, describing evolutionary reasons fro addiction, and more importantly discussing "Unethical Game Design". The tricks that developers use to trap the user into wanting to come back for more. A very thought provoking piece, check it out here or here: It's only 15 mins... c'mon. Love and Obscure Skyrim memes, Richie X.