That guy's a Maniac...

Chuff_72 is back. He's stranded on a isolated island somewhere and only has his mobile phone to play games on. He's been kind enough to wire his reviews over so we can laugh and point at mobile 'games'. They'll never be the future. This is Slayin (no “g”, no fucking apostrophe either, apparently RETRO means bad grammar too). Despite looking like shit it’s really enjoyable, and a cleverly condensed RPG in the mould of the infinite runner, because that little blue lump keeps on running, but only on one screen. If you run into stuff with your pointy thing they die, if they run into your back passage you lose a chunk of life. There is a jump button, it’s the massive grey button on the right. The controls (left, right, jump) work for once, which is cause for much rejoicing. During levels you can run into a shop and buy upgrades to keep you running, there are boss fights, and cheevos. It’s really good. That’s pretty much the review, below is all moani

There seems to be a lot of discussion at the moment about defining the language we use to describe gaming and more broadly defining the culture. One of the things we worry about here is how we preserve gaming. It's a medium we're still in the position to save most of but very little is being done to preserve it.  This recent Extra Credits video rather nicely sums up some of the major barriers to preserving the physical stuff of games. We aren't ardent institutionalists but we'd really like to see gaming museums seriously explore preserving and celebrating (museums are more than just historical archives). Museums have started to look at gaming and there have been a number of exhibitions on or incorporating gaming but to date there hasn't been an concentrated effort on displaying gaming for it's own sake. The Smithsonian exhibition The Art of Video Games and the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum were both good starts and both the Victoria Albert M

Meet Omastar, the (Oma) star of Omastar Comics and of twitter fame . You could say Omastar is my favourite Pokémon but you'd be wrong. My favourite Pokémon is Dactylocer, MY Omastar. let me explain. One of the wonderful and often overlooked features of the Pokémon series of games, including the main series of games and some of the spin offs, has been the ability to transfer Pokémon not just from one game to the next but most importantly from one generation to the next. This feature goes as far back as Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire . Pokémon were transferable from one game to the other in the Green, Blue, Red and Yellow games and these games were compatible with the Nintendo 64 Pokémon Stadium , and Pokémon Stadium 2 but sadly the Pokémon caught in these games couldn't be transferred beyond that. Since 2002's Ruby and Sapphire games it's been possible to transfer pocket monsters from one game to another up until the latest generation Pokémon Black Version 2

We've been on a bonanza of buying older Wii games to add to the collection. We avoided the original Red Steel on account of the awful reviews but wanted to try Red Steel 2, partly because it's one of the few games to use Wii Motion Plus. We're about halfway through but feel it's enough to put down some thoughts about it. It's a perfectly functional if somewhat generic game. The motion controls irk at first, swordplay isn't mapped one to one to the Wiimote, the reason for this is so that a multitude of attacks can be mapped to flick, twisting, holding and tapping buttons in combinations with flails. After a couple of hours the controls become second nature and every enemy encounter can be played a number of different ways similar to the encounters in Resident Evil 4 . It's not quite mindless and if you aren't paying attention every enemy goon can take you out.  Oddly, the game  just sort of starts. There's very little in the way of introdu

MCV reports that Nintendo will be shutting down several Wii online services . Our heart skipped a beat for a second thinking that maybe the plug had been pulled on Monster Hunter Tri or Mario Kart Wii and our hunter might be trapped in subexcellent armour or our online ranking on MK might be forever frozen at a measly 8500 points. Fortunately, for the meantime, these games aren't affected but come the 28th of June Nintendo, News, Weather, Everybody Votes and Mii Contest Channels will be mothballed forever. Also going is the ability to send messages on the Wii Message Board This illustrates something that really pisses us off about modern consoles; increasingly the console and games you buy are really just a license to use services until such time as the servers are unplugged.  Now most people probably won't mourn the loss of these services but as this series has shown we thought they were pretty great albeit underused service. We've had some hands on time with New Su

Last weekend, once again we went through the humiliating ritual of busting down to the nearest GAME with our DSi and copies of Pokémon White and Pokémon Black Version 2 to download Legendary 'mon Meloetta. That takes us up to a sweet 648/649 (Deoxys aaargh) in our eternal mission to Catch 'em all , this generation of Pokémon is the closest we've come. In all our years of playing these ridiculous games, Nintendo seem to have finally realised that yes, Europe is a viable region and that some people do play their multi million selling game series. For previous generations we'd get shafted over special events and event only Pokémon meaning that unless you turned to an Action Replay you were destined to have to live with empty spaces dotting the pokedex. That's not to say that all regions are treated equally. Oh no. With Pokémon Black and White Version 2 there's now a multitude of ways to receive special gift pokémon and items from Mother Ninty. gifts

We recently picked up Sin & Punishment Successor to the Stars, Star Rod Sky Pirates Knights. Surprisingly, despite 3 years of rave reviews and fond reflections by everyone who ever played it, it is rather good. When we get a new game, we have a ritual. We pour over the instruction book first, reading the "plot" bit (which is still the place where most games actually describe the context of the world you're about to visit). Weirdly, the above image is in the instruction booklet illustrating the biography of Kachi one of the two playable characters. It appears she's hurriedly getting dressed, bra is out, one boot on. Fine. Maybe she's a ditsy character and her thing is always being late or something? We've not yet played through the whole game yet but this doesn't seem to be her deal.   It's just a weird image to use isn't it? I mean yes, please let us perve over the female characters at our own leisure just don't start the misogyny