EDGE magazine still taking the piss!

Due to our important role as a barometer for games due for general release we get sent shit loads of stuff in the post. Games, consoles, merchandise, costumes and magazines. As a consequence we get sent a copy of EDGE magazine. It's not that we would buy it anyway but when you are on the crapper you need something to read that isn't Games TM.Not so long ago you may remember that popular digital culture magazine Electronic Dreams Games Enema (EDGE)published a rather piss poor article about Menu screens. At the time we came up with a list of other piss poor articles that lazy writers could put together but in a valiant show of defiance they went one better and this month's EDGE carries an extremely "interesting" article about booklets with games.


The little books you get with games. Honestly of all the topics ripe for an article about gaming. On top of that the editors seem to think it is a good idea to fill ever increasing chunks of the magazines with developer and career shit. Once again this month seems to focus on the North East. Again. Time to rerun the Scandanavian article again guys? Nobody reads it anyway.

This paucity of decent content indicates that they are really stuck for ideas over at EDGE during these harsh empty summer months when all the people who can make decent decisions are off on ironic holiday in Wales. Which is why we took 49 seconds out of our precious day to put together this helpful list for some ideas for future (ha ha) articles:

An article about the best font used in a game and the best colour combinations. Is white on blue the new black on beige?

An article about the little shapes on the spine of the Nintendo game boxes and what they mean. I know what they mean! I know!

An article about some of EDGE's previous worst articles from the Prey review to the overly glowing preview of Mirror's edge.

An article about why all "Official magazines" are a big pile of wank even though most of them are written by the same seven people at future publishing.

An article about the worst control systems ever with special mention for games that don't let you reconfigure buttons or invert the y-axis so we can't play FPSs like a flight simulator.

A behind the scenes article about how Future Publishing's Bath office is always empty.

An article about the last month's issue of EDGE with interviews with last month's writers and Kieron Gillen.

An article about memory card icons from the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 days.

An article about the 'notes' sections within game booklets.

A cutting article about the best Prima strategy guide.

A two part article about how Beyond Good and Evil was better than Ico and how Ico was better than Beyond Good and Evil even though both were better and worse and overhyped and underhyped and overappreciated yet underappreciated more and less than SODDING PSYCHONAUTS.

Once again guys, feel free to use any of these ideas whilst wondering why the magazine sales head ever closer to oblivion. Cheers drive!

Pushing the PC gaming boundaries

The BBC has this nice little article about how PCs are better at games than consoles or some such. I don't really know as I haven't fully read it as my attention span only lasts for a paragraph before I'm bored. But I got the gist.

All I do know is that whatever you may think about PCs, the people that play them are GEEKS. Nerdo-rama. They wear big rimmed glasses and have braces. They don't have sex either. They just beat off over video game characters who sex with other dead video game characters (see above Fahrenheit).

Some guy from Nvidia says:

"It's absolute nonsense to think that consoles are at the cutting edge,"

Yeah but only fucking nerds buy your shitty graphics cards and that clearly isn't enough. That's why you put those little leaflets in every single one of Future Publishing's console oriented magazines going on and on about how Nvidia is the future and good. BTW Nvidia, those leaflets are shit. Purely because PC games are mostly boring stuff about menu managment or Orcs. Don't believe me? If you were Nvidia and you made good graphics cards for PC games who would you have as your mascot? Some kind of three penised dragon with chainsaw guns on it's seven legs cutting up thousands of Triceratops-bats and there is blood everywhere and no matter how long you look you can always find something new to look at. The pained expression on a Triceratops-bat's face as it's guts spill out. The little dribbles of blood from the dragon tri-penis. NOT A FUCKING MERMAID I BET. If PCs are so great Nvidia, why do you pander to the geeky nerdbase users by rendering tits all the time?. Fucking idiots. If you are on a PC anyway, you are only ever two clicks away from photos of real or enhanced titty-bons.

Oh and another thing about PC gaming, imagine this: you buy a woman of the night and take her home you get yourself ready, lube to hand, and all of a sudden a guy pops out of your closet and says sorry you can't do that bird you just bought because your hardware isn't up to it. You can only do her after you've spent £200 on penis enhancements but even then you can only do her when she is looking ugly or if she is on the blob and spotty and even then only a for a bit because your hardware cannot cope with her at her hottest and she is getting increasingly hot. That wasn't actually a story that was an analogy. In the analogy the woman of the night is a computer game and the man's penis is his PC. For geeks that are reading this and are unfamiliar with my terms a woman looks like this:

You like it huh? Well imagine if you couldn't do her or her cantaloupe melon tits. That's what playing games on a PC is. Despite what Nvidia nerds may tell you through the BBC. Which is full of geeks anyway. Just buy a DS and the witch touching game if you are that desperate for tits. At least on the DS you can kind of touch them.

Fucking nerds and mermaids. Geeks.

Margaret Robertson tells it like it is

An anonymoose sent me this link (via the Beeb). It's former EDGE editor Margaret Robertson on why she plays games. She starts the piece very controversially saying that games are rubbish! Oooh1 I'm outraged but then she ends it by saying this about Guitar Hero:

"But somehow, even though I can't do it, my brain can.
And so I get to watch, astonished and really rather proud, as my hand taps out the right sequence.
If I'm playing Guitar Hero on the expert setting, I know as a matter of certainty that I can't keep up with the sequence of notes streaming by.

Not least because my eyes go completely out of focus within about a minute. And yet, somehow, my brain and my hand have done a deal, and notes are streaming out of the screen and my score is through the roof.

Check me out - I'm amazing. And that's not arrogance. I don't take any credit for it. I can't."



And I think she is saying something here that I haven't really seen expressed so succinctly anywhere else. AND SHE IS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT READERS. Although for me it isn't why I play computer games I am often amazed at how the brain goes into automatic. With games like Devil May Cry and Super Smash Brothers you watch the screen and you're pulling off some amazing moves and combos but if you try to think about what you are doing you mess up and the on screen avatar seems to go into retard mode compared to the dazzling brilliance from before. It's the same with Final Fantasy, Pokemon and Resident Evil Games that require a lot of menu checking. Even a simple task like equipping an item can make your brain hurt when you start to think about the buttons you are pressing (select, X, down, down, right, X, down, X, Triangle Triangle Triangle) but when you are in automatic your hands just seem to react to your thoughts without actually thinking about what you are physically doing.
Don't believe me? Try explaining to someone how you do a smash attack on Super Smash Brothers or Taki's overhead jump move on Soulblade or any of the weapon cheats on GTA. It's either really hard or you just can't remember the buttons without having a controller there. Even then you have to look down at the pad to register the names of the buttons that your brain knows by position. I even had an idea for some LAZY GAME ART where you have a video playing of, I dunno, someone busting Dead Rising, on the right and a video of the players hands and controllers playing next to it. It looks weird. It just looks like the hands are randomly fitting all over the pad. Look at your mates hands next time they are playing a game. It doesn't appear that their hand movements and button presses are relating to the on screen movements but we all know they are.

It is also for this reason that I rarely use the touchscreen if possible. Especially for Resident Evil DS and Pokemon Diamond. I can navigate menus, use items, check the pokedex and attack far faster using the buttons over the touch screen. Maybe it's just habit or how I grew up playing games but it's also why I'm not too happy with some of the Wii games especially Wii Play and Wii Sports. There's just not that level of precision without me re-training my brain but maybe I'm just lazy and happy to stick with what I know.

Anywho, Kudos to Margaret and the BBC for doing some real games journalism instead of crappy new journalism pish or whining about sexism in Wing Commander (the game not the film with Freddy Prinz Jr.)

Noogins.

World of Postcraft Part 3: The Burning Crusade

Yeah so my Journalism Project? Well what I was doing was applying to Edge. Recently Kotaku announced that edge were hiring so, I thought what the hell, despite its numerous spelling mistakes, I'll call thatguys my portfolio. At the very least I was aiming to get a trip to their offices in Bath, that way we can all wnak over how obscure the Japanese are, whilst discussing the "Uncanny Valley" in a mild yet pretentious tone.

The things I was supposed to have:

1) Excellent writing ability, with an enthusiasm for grammar, research and structure as well as for expressing your opinion and communicating your passion.
"One word, Wnak"

2) An in-depth knowledge of videogaming, its history, and its culture.
"Dude, check the site! We still play PS1 games! And I can get 96 worlds complete in Super Mario World on the SNES in one sitting.

3) A real curiosity to fill any gaps in that in-depth knowledge.
"Yeah I am missing August to December 1999 "I'm sure I had a Dreamcast, but cant remember playing anything on it. I feel like Jim Carrey in that sunshine movie"

4) Creative flair - Edge writers have input into every aspect of the magazine, from topics covered to visual presentation
"Hey if you switch the "A" and the "N" around in Wank..."

5) An exceptional commitment to excellence
"Assuming excellence does not want to get married or have kids any time soon..."

What you don't need to have:

1) A portfolio of published work
"Dammit, tough, I'm showing www.thatguys.co.uk off"

2) A degree
"Ahh, now it becomes clear as to what edge is such a good magazine"

3) Experience of working on a magazine or similar publication
"Bollocks what kind of interview is this, you don't see fucking NASA scientists fucking interviewing for a position requesting that the applicant does not need a PhD in astrophysics, pffft"

The application process itself involved:

1) Confirm your salary expectations for this role
Easy, more than I get paid right now.

2) Enter a covering letter explaining what it is that attracts you to Edge, and what you'd be able to offer the magazine.
I Didn't really work long enough on this one but, it would have gone a bit like this:

The appeal of working for Edge mainly comes from the desire to brag that I work for a Gaming Magazine, which in turn stems from my desire to fuck vulnerable gamer chicks, who, though they seem inexperienced, are not. They were instead rejected by a lover because they were better than him at pro-evo. But they didn't get it, they played the game and got the ball in the net, they never felt the passion, being beat like that is the worst kind of being beaten, it sullies a mans pride. And as a fit of rebellion against this first lover she feels that she must stay committed to this gamer cause though she lacks the imagination, desire and obsession, and fuck any guy who suggests that gaming with a relationship could work. It's like art or music... yeah you get female artists and musicians but the real genius, passion always comes from men, Beethoven, Einstein, Da Vinci, Wilde, Van Gogh etc. Look at Jack White, he did that cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene, or Nancy Sinatra's Bang Bang, both the songs, though sung from the female point of view (which can be a bit gay) are infinitely better! The man knows passion. The only passion girls have is lust and that happens once a month right after they are off-the-blob and they can fuck (less messily) again. Women, don't mistake where your skills lie... yeah you are more organised, yeah you are better at multitasking, and these are all attributes that can make you "good" at games, but you lack that spark. It's like an NPC, they can talk to you, they can follow you about, they can even defend your life, but in the end they are just AI and will end up failing/leaving you.

I can offer Edge:

- A new name, "That Guys a Maniac".

- A new style of publishing, "Ad-Hoc".

- A new style of reviewing "Does it have dinosaurs in it? No? Then it is Shite."

3) Write a 500-word article, written in the style of Edge, making the case for someone - or something - you think is videogaming's unsung hero.

This, in my opinion, was the biggest part of the application So I spent quite some time coming up with ideas as to what videogaming's unsung hero, these included:

- The "?" bricks in Mario.
- Mayhem, from that C64 game "Mayhem in Monsterland". It is an obscure retro angle, but to be honest, I think I am rose-tinting the game and it was probably shit.
- Me
- The guy in the truck from the start of Resident Evil 2, for the best gaming quote, ever.

But after much deliberation I decided to rip-off the Sony ad from years ago:

Who is it that saves the princess?
Who has the fastest laptime?
Who is it that kills the terrorists?
Who has the highest score?
Who is it that does the 100+ hit combo?
Who lifts the world cup?

The answer is the player... Until recently it has been hard for armchair-gaming to be recognised amongst peers, but with high-speed internet accessible in all homes and every console with online capabilities, more and more people are getting acknowledged for their "Leet Skillz".

In the past the player's achievements were recorded in 3 letters on frequently reset arcade machines, in the recesses of your memory card, or simply by getting your mates round and thrashing them. For those who wanted to prove their worth to other around them there was LAN gaming, endless feuds of FPSs and RTSs, however setting these types of games were not entirely "User Friendly" and carried the stereotype of a gamer who could actually setup LAN networks.

But now with the introduction of Xbox live, gamerscores and achievements coupled with more and more people accepting games on the whole, these rankings can be our new window into potential pro-gamers. X-box tournaments are even being set-up for "Real-World" prizes, no longer is there a need to haul a pimped-out-PC to a warehouse LAN-party to get kudos for headshots, this can all be done from the comfort of the sofa via the same hardware.

A while ago ESPN (the US Sports channel) decided to consider gaming as a sport...

And that's it, very soon afterwards I realised that I deliberated too much and missed the deadline. Sorry I know that's a bit of an anti-climax especially for a post of this size... But that's it...

Signing out.

Richie.