New That Guys 'Girlfriend' Identified

See here the lovely Lisa Courtney officially has the World's Largest Collection of Pokemon Memorabilia and we are seething with jealousy so bad right now.
We thought we were contenders for it but Lisa's collection dwarfs the TGAM meagre collection of:

• Copies of Pokemon Red, 2 x Blue, Yellow, SIlver, Gold, Ruby Sapphire, Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, TCG, Ranger, Link, Stadium, Stadium 2, Colosseum, Ruby & Sapphire Box, Channel, XD, Snap and Mystery Dungeon Time.
• A Psyduck Plushie.
• Seven or so key rings of Pikachu.
• An Eevee that senses motion and says Veeeeeeeeeee (batteries not working).
• A copy of Pikachu's Global Adventure.
• Legal copies of the first film on DVD and VHS, two copies of the second film and one of the fourth film.
• A bunch of rubbish stuff from that awful day
• Loads more other stuff that we are way too embarrassed to go into. Very little of it is official Nintendo merchandise mind. Some of it is totally home made too.

So, in resurrecting a feature we did four years ago Lisa wins this month's maniac award and is deserving of the title on two separate levels! Expect an interview or shaky photos of her through a window soon! She gets plus points for arranging them in colour.

PS: Also, you should check out that video because our mate Guy Cocker is in it. I'm sure he is a great guy an all but we'll be damned if we could ever get past his name.

Some stuff on Pokemon

Richie is totally away at the moment which means that the thin veil of quality control we pretend we have here at TGAM is now completely gone. However, problems with quality control and staying 'on message' have been with us for months. Despite being called That Guy's A Maniac we haven't posted anything about Resident Evil ever since that Sheva Nude cheat. We should rename ourselves in order to better reflect the content. An obscure eleven year old game quote just won't cut it anymore. In fact I copied all the text from the last month of TGAM and auto-summarized it in word over and over until it pared down to something that looks like a blog title.

This is the result: Time Crisis (GunCon)Time Crisis 3 How much gaming does he do? posted by Cunzy11 at 3:00 PM 3 comments TGAM top 50 ultimate TGAM top games best list of best games of all time ever: Number 41 Unlike all the other Resident Evil games on this list, this game is new. 42: Wii Play Tanks! In other gaming news: Types. Training. 1. No Legendary Pokémon. 2. No Cheaty Pokémon. * New main game quests GAME. 3)Alternatively do a quick draw game.

TGAM is dead!

Long live Time Crisis (GunCon)Time Crisis 3 How much gaming does he do? posted by Cunzy11 at 3:00 PM 3 comments TGAM top 50 ultimate TGAM top games best list of best games of all time ever: Number 41 Unlike all the other Resident Evil games on this list, this game is new. 42: Wii Play Tanks! In other gaming news: Types. Training. 1. No Legendary Pokémon. 2. No Cheaty Pokémon. * New main game quests GAME. 3)Alternatively do a quick draw game.

Expect T-shirts to hit the stores soon!

In other news: There's a new Pokemon clone in town and it is called Bakumon or something and here is why is it highly unlikely to be a Pokemon beater. There are scores of Pokemon clones out there Fossil Fighters, Dino King, Invisimles to mention but a few of the recent offerings. They always get tipped for success but they never do what they promise or what people hype them to do. Aside from being late to the table they never replicate the success of Pokemon because:

• They take the idea of catch 'em and then fight 'em but fail to expand the universe or ideas beyond this. For example, in Dino King there is literally nothing to do outside of progressing the central story. The same is true of Fossil league and Dino Master. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl are still challenging after 500+ hours because there are thousands of gameplay elements that underlie the central game and most of them are very very deep or complex.
• The variation in Pokemon is infinite. 491 of the blighters to choose between in the first instance, most of which can be male or female, each one will have one of 25 natures, options from a pool of tens of different moves to fill the four move slots, Individual values, effort values, choice out of hundreds of hold items etc. etc. By contrast the clones tend to have very limited or poorly understood mechanisms for creating variation which reduces the replayability value and prevents the build up of a dedicated community who want to master the game.
• Although anime series come with these franchises almost as standard it is clear that either the series or the game has been tacked on afterward and continuity isn't very well preserved between formats. Although there was a gap between the launch of the Pokemon games and anime in different territories none of the contenders to the throne seem to be as well integrated from the start with elements appearing in both formats.
• The levelling system is very very tight and balanced in Pokemon and after all it's been under development for at least 13 years. In fact even when this system is wholesale lifted out of one genre and put into another as with the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games it still works. From experience of some of the clones it never seems to quite be as balanced or challenging.
• Pokemon, the original 150 at least, are mostly inspired by naturally occurring entities including animals, plants, rocks, martial arts(?) and mythical creatures. Some of the contenders lampoon the lampoon and by being that little bit further removed from a strong central idea takes away a great deal from the flavour. Monsters based on caterpillars, rhinos and the fossil genus Anomalocaris are much more universally appealing than japanese robots, various kinds of dragons and all that Yu-gi-oh shit.
• The cross generation trading of Pokemon keeps the older games alive. I still do some training on the 2003 games before I migrate them to the GC, DS and Wii games. Note that many of these clones are often one shots that appear at the peak of the franchise popularity and then quickly fade away. The phenomenal sales of Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver, essentially a remake of a ten year old game is testament to the longevity of the appeal from the veteran audience as well as attracting new audiences.
• Thanks to the fastidious online Pokemon community almost all of the secrets and mechanics of the games have been revealed. Studying this information before training up your Pokemon almost works well as a meta game in it's own right. Other franchises clearly just don't have this resource and most players are too lazy or busy to try to work it all out for themselves.

In short, it is not good enough to release a shallow catch the monsters-train the monsters-fight the monsters game, an accompanying anime and maybe a TCG then just sit back and expect the profits to come rolling in. Pokemon is very good game in its own right and makers of these clones need to study more than just the box art in order to get it all right.

Breaking News!

In case you missed the TV-adverts, radio spots, advertorials, news features, interviews with Will Wright, selling out sponsorship on every gaming blog, magazine adverts and zeitgeist "Sporn" articles then you read it here first, Spore is out.

We have had an exclusive hands off playthrough with both the DS version and the lesser known PC version. You won't find another hands off exclusive like this anywhere else!

Spore Creatures for Nintendo DS.Many companies release fully fledged games for the proper consoles then release some half-arsed watered down version on the DS. All the publicity and the marketing for the proper versions means that many people buy the DS version on good faith only to find that it is a steaming pile of GBA shite. Spore Creatures for the DS is one of these games. Imagine, if you will, a watered down version of pokemon put through the Fossil League Dinosaur Tournament Championship filter and then whisked together lightly for twenty minutes with Drawn Together. That's what you get. It's awful and clearly has been quickly put together to generate some extra dollars off the back of the main game. We give it 4/10. Gamespot is too afraid to even review it in case they lose all the spore advertising money.

Spore the "Real one" for the Personal Computer.

Unlike the shoddy DS version (see above) the PC version is okay, the same way that the Sims was okay.
Hours 1-36 after opening. After tearing open the package and installing the game it slowly dawns on you that this is the future of gaming and within your very hands lies perhaps the greatest game of all time. Spore will silence all the critics of gaming and all your friends who laugh at your hobby will suddenly take an interest. You will be a guru to them! Hours 1-36 will be played straight in a row. The first day will be mostly creating creatures. Hours 24-36 will be spent evolving and managing your civilisations.
Hours 415-420 after opening. You probably won't have really played it since those first few crazy days as you felt a bit "game dirty" so you dedicated time to going out in the real world with your real friends in order to compensate. However, the time away from the game has given you some exciting ideas for creature creation. You load up the game and play it for five hours. It's alright but you can't quite do all the things you imagined in your head. You quickly look on GameFaqs for some kind of cheat that lets you dispense with the boring bits and log out when you get bored.
Some time in 2014.After a conversation about it in the pub you remember how great Spore was and load up the old game file. Within an hour you realise why you hate it. It's good in theory but exhausting and ultimately unsatisfying in the long run. You get bored and play 20 hours straight of Burnout 2 on the old PlayStation 2.
Later in 2014.Toy with the idea of deleting your save game during a file cleanup but realise that it will take you ages to get back to the point you got to 6 years ago on that first day.
2020. You get a virus on your computer and the Spore save files as well as all your photos from University are forever lost to the ether. 7/10.

So there you have it. Hands off exclusive from TGAM. Join us next time where we will be discussing our best dead maiden upskirt moments from Ninja games.

Omastar Comics #9

This week Omastar tells us about the time he fought racism, real racism, not the internet kind.

Alas, that stupid kid getting in the way just as you were about to finish off the bad guy. That's how it always goes dude. ALWAYS