That guy's a Maniac...

With, it seems, the whole games industry writing off the Wii in preparation for the Wii-U, now is a great time to snap up some of the quirkier releases on the platform which are currently selling for ridiculously cheap prices. Recently we've picked up Cursed Mountain, Deadly Creatures, Metroid: Other M, Disaster Day of Crisis and Madworld for less than £16 (for all of them). Individually they are a bit quirky but they represent a time and a platform with more interesting ideas than current HD console gaming which seems stuck in a bit of a rut with a a severe case of sequelitis. Trauma Center: Second Opinion is one we snapped up for a fiver a while ago and we've only just got around to playing it. We played Trauma Center/re: Under The Knife, the one and only popular medical 'em up on the DS. It was fun, if not a bit tough and also challenging. The Wii version, Trauma Center/re: Second Opinion is pretty much exactly the same game albeit with a name change and with the a

Occasionally we stub out our crack pipe (hard but do-able), log off the forums and give up our angry Internet man jig to don a smocking jacket , pour ourselves a Malibu and read a book like in the olden times. This weekend we donned three smoking jackets, poured ourselves three Malibus and finished reading three books. Our English teacher will be so happy with us.  First up is Jacked The Unauthorised Behind-The-Scenes Story of Grand Theft Auto which makes us feel ignorant about the history of video games in the same way that Replay A History of Video Games highlights how ignorant many games 'journalists' are . Yeah we loved Lemmings and knew that DMA made GTA but we didn't know that they were Scottish. Shame on us. The book is a good read. The first thing it made us do is want to play GTA again. Five hours later we picked the book up again and cringed over how gushy Kushner can be sometimes. But I guess that's the deal when you are writing an unofficial biograp

Waaay back in 2007 we interviewed the Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 . Well, we've kept in touch since and although he now spends most of his time caring for sick marine iguanas at a the Nemesis Iguana Sanctuary we've managed to catch an interview with him about the reprisal of his, perhaps best known role, in the Nemesis Mode DLC for the astonishingly awful cover based shooter based Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City . TGAM lazy fictional cephalopod, Omastar is finally back from a tour of the Unova region and so attempts to earn his keep by catching up with everybody's favourite biological weapon.  OMASTAR: Star oma, omastar. Star oma? Oma oma? Nemesis: S.T.A.R.S! O: Oma oma star omastar oma omastar, star oma star oma star oma omastar? N: S.T.A.R.S! O: Oma, oma? N: S.T.A.R.S O: Oma? N: S.T.A.R.S! O: Star? N: S.T.A.R.S! O:Oma? N: S.T.A.R.S! O: Star? N: Is this guy for real? All he says is the same three words over and over again? I'm a seriou

Although obviously we'd be callous to not empathise with friends and strangers whose lives will be disrupted by whatever ends up happening with GAME group's stores, the company only has itself to blame. Of course, only now is everyone jumping on the GAME bandwagon. It isn't a charity. It is supposed to be a commercial business. It hasn't been serving PC gamers (a massive chunk of the market) for quite a long time and it hasn't been serving us for almost as long. Our gaming tastes aren't niche but we don't tend to go for the BIG AAA releases and as such GAME hasn't been catering for us. Here's a summary of our whinging over the years about GAME. Hopefully, with whatever succeeds it we won't have call to type up our frustrations and send them into the ether to be ignored by all. In June 2009, GAME performed poorly on our store survey when we used to write for that other site occasionally. In February 2010, we wrote to Konami abou

This time from should-know-better David Braben. EDGE 'have' the story Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V from Gamasutra. Every now and then someone from the games industry will raise their head above the parapet and blame pre-owned games for their own poor sales without a shred of evidence to back it up. Here's choice quote from Braben on why pre-owned is killing single player games: I mean, the idea of a game selling out used to be a good thing, but nowadays, those people who buy it on day one may well finish it and return it. And of course, marketeers not marketing games after launch week really helps too right? Oh and the so called gaming press asymmetrically hyping a game up to launch then dropping coverage as if the game never existed once it is actually out has nothing to do with it? Perhaps devs should make a game that last longer than a day or even games that people might want to keep? Presumably, Braben has data for how pre-owned has adversely affected Frontier Developments

So we love video game music. Not all of it, but when it is good we'll take it over millionaires crooning about getting their arse out or falling in love any day. It gets into our mind. So (bear with me) there's an advert on TV for the perfume Opium which has been on the idiot box quite a lot recently. I keep seeing it and it reminded me of a game. In particular this ad at 20 seconds.   Eventually, it came to me! It's from the Notre Dame theme from Timesplitters 2, composed of course by Graemem Norgate, one of the few men we'd happily marry without even meeting (we swooned when he wrote to us ). The relevant bit is in the vid DOWN HERE at 1:31:   And of course, both of these were 'inspired by' a certain Mr Mozart, this vid at 2:35.   Here's the handy URLs to skip the rest and straight to the bit I'm on about should you wish you music cretin Opium , Splitters , Mozart . That's it. Just saying. Jeez. End of the music lesson. Now. Fuck o

So that's that busted then. Not wishing for the 11 or so hours we spent on the game to be completely wasted we thought we'd fire our thoughts about the game into the ether because, you know, there are millions of people out there wanting to read a two year late review of Metroid: Other M . Its those millions that keep us going. Well for those of you who made it to this bit, we've got some exclusive behind the scenes stuff right here where we talk about our feelings and stuff. We're letting you see our soft squishy innards rather than the darksteel exterior of our shared internet persona. We find ourselves as the unlikeliest of Nintendo fans. If you could turn, turn back the hands of time to the PS2 days we'd happily bet money on the fact that we wouldn't (well I wouldn't) be playing a Nintendo home console pretty much exclusively. See there's nothing wrong with Mario, with perhaps the exception that almost everything has a smiley face and eyes, bu