Obligatory Modern Warfare Post

Yeah well, we cant really call ourselves a gamer website without mentioning this.

Consider it mentioned.

Oh and by the way, Makro have it for £20, that's the cheapest in the UK.

Love and Hugs,

Right between the eyes Richie X

We got a reply!

Remember that lost post when we emailed LEGEND Graeme Norgate? Well he only friggin emailed back, which to be honest has made us gush like a mucopurulent teenage girl at a Jonas Brothers gig under a waterfall.

Here's what Big G had to say:

Hello,
Thanks for the email, glad to hear you like my stuff...going all the way back to KI too, that is retro :)

the "is that too loud" bit is just me messing around with sounds and for some reason putting them on the gameover screen of Timesplitters 2. I can't quite remember the reasoning behind it now, I think it stems back to when I would listen to vinyl as a kid, and sometimes you'd get a "hidden" message right at the end.

Thanks again
Regards
Graeme

This email gave us lots of useful information about Graeme. Like, if we want to be like Graeme we'll say KI instead of Killer Instinct. Also, we got a fricking emoticon. I'm never gonna wash my email inbox ever again.

So that's the reason behind the little noise and make sure you go to Graeme's excellent site and make sure you hire him because the man knows how to make a kick ass tune to shoot people by.

The top ten of Iphone games/apps

Yes. I'm capitalizing Iphone and I'm spelling capitalizing like a yank. It's going to be one of those posts. But we mustn't shun the new platforms when they come out we should welcome them with open arms to join the fold. Recently, Steven Gates (is he the apple man? It really doesn't matter) tried to prove that the Iphone was the shit because it had more games than the DS and the PSP.

By that reckoning the PC is then the best gaming device! Didn't think about that Gates did you, you lemon.

Anyway, much like the Nintendo DS, the Iphone does have a whole load of steaming shit available for it with the occasional warm gem hidden in the pat. Nobody is going to suggest that any of them are all time greats but here's a summary of the best presented in the tried and tested Top 10 tradition:

Top Ten Original Iphone Games.

There isn't a single original Iphone game. Every Iphone game is either a port, a clone or in the worst cases an adaptation of a mini game from another game proper. This is fact.

Top Ten Iphone Apps.

Apps sounds stupid. Then again so does Iphone. Iphone with a capital 'I' also looks stupid. Finding the top ten was difficult. In fact I couldn't find more than one. I may have made the top one up also. Here it is, it's called Icunt simulator 2013 and it is an app that turns your Iphone into a sign that says "I'm a massive cunt" every time you use the Iphone inappropriately. These instances include, but are not restricted to: showing people holiday photos in a pub or club, using twitter, messing around with trying to find that restaurant you were looking for for so long that phoning the restaurant for directions or asking somebody walking past or in fact just wandering around until you found it anyway would have been quicker, doing anything other than phoning somebody else. In all of these instances the Iphone would only display the aforementioned sign until it was put back into a pocket. If it is put into a special Iphone holder it continues to display the sign until the batteries run out.

Top Ten Iphone Games.

That Loco Roco clone, the Crash Bandicoot clone, the Mario Kart one, the bejewelled one, the one that is like that better version on the DS, that game that just displays the rude sign, the tower defense one, that one like that PlayStation block game that begins with a K, Kurushi!, is that ten yet? I can't even bring myself to count.

Overall score Because there is always a score. A-haven't-we-played-all-these-games-before-but-in-their-much-better-and-expanded-versions-buying-a-paint-tester-isn't-the-same-as-painting-the-house- 5/10. 3 of those points are for the fictional app game I made up/stole from a stand up comedian?

We're going to Glastonbury

Cause he called our* girlfriend fat innit.


*Yeah we share one.

Wii Play Tanks! has been doing my head in, I just want a gold medal but keep dying god it is so annoying I just want to beat it but can't.

Shit. Did it again.

Photocopier

Note to anyone who has been, is or ever will be associated with a Star Wars game.

Is it at all possible to be so brash to ask that we the gamers don't have to play the Echo Base Hoth battle ever again? Can't we come up with some kind of peripheral that scans all your memory cards and save files in your house and just skips that whole level if it finds a Star Wars save game, which we must have done about a million times.

Yes, using the tow cable to pull down the At-Ats is fun the first two hundred times but enough is enough. Lets stop it now and come up with something that we don't have to borrow from 1980. Because at the moment, when I die, killing that first zombie in resident evil (and subsequent remakes) and going round and round At-ats is going to take up a considerable chunk of my whole life flashing before my eyes. Like more than a fifth at least.

Meatspace.

You may ask when is a good time to use the word 'meatspace' instead of terms like 'the real world' of 'the physical world'.

The answer is never, children, never. You never need to use it and any time you do, attractive girls and normal guys with jobs, cars, pensions and mortgages laugh at you and point at you and call you Urkel and do the things with the fingers to make glasses over their eyes. Then you'll probably make a webcomic where you kill the attractive girls and normal guys with a Buster sword and all your forum friends will send you emoticons until your inner balance is restored.
You may also ask when is a good time to use the word 'meatspace' to refer to female nether regions.

There isn't really a good time to use that word in that context either I am afraid. To reiterate, nobody should ever use the word meatspace.

I have preemptively written to the OED to tell them to take meatspace out of their dictionaries or us and the lads will be putting dictionaries into their meatspaces.

Game of the Year 2008

ANIMAL CROSSING WILD WORLD REVIEW
For Nintendo DS

Animal Crossing isn't a game. It's a career. A vocation, a mini alternative life. You could educate a child with it and it would turn out OK. It teaches you everything you need to know about the real world. It teaches you the importance of money, shows you the true value of patience, punishes you for lying, and when characters move out of your town it's an important lesson about the harsh realities of bereavement in adult life. Bunnie is gone, Timothy, she's gone to another town very far away and she's never coming back.

It's not a game, it's a job. You HAVE to collect your fruit to begin with, else you can't afford the cool furniture. You HAVE to keep fishing, else you might miss a rare fish. You HAVE to collect all the fossils, fish and insects because something cool might happen when you do. Animal Crossing uses an enhanced version of the COLLECTEVERYTHING(TM) engine that Nintendogs used. It makes chores into games, giving you incentives to spend hours and hours doing nothing in the hope of finding one rare little thing no one else has got.

When we bought it we played it for an hour and a half in bed in the morning, we played it for an hour and a half in the afternoon, we played it for an hour and a half in the evening, then for an hour an a half in bed before going to bed. If anything that's an underestimate, because starting to play Animal Crossing is like stepping into a time machine where suddenly it's a huge amount of time in the future when you turn it off and look at the clock.

That's another reason why it's great. You can use it to fast forward your boring life. So anyway, we played it for six hours a day (minimum) for the first few weeks of having it. Some of those six-hour periods were spent fishing. Just fishing. Fishing, then running to the shop to sell them, or to the Museum to donate any rare ones we caught. The game keeps a list of all the fish you've caught, which is one of numerous mini, incidental challenges you have to complete. In your own time and whenever you like. We're now down to about three 15-minute periods of play a day, which is much more manageable.

Animal Crossing really suits the handheld. You can play it for ten minutes in the morning, a bit at lunch time and switch it on in the evening for a proper play. It's why Wild World is such a perfect game. We do all our farming/shopping chores in the morning on the train to work instead of reading about war in a newspaper, then spend the evening having fun instead of watching war on the news. And wi-fi play lets you do it all in another town, with the added excitement of random router crashes to keep everyone on edge. It's the perfect game and it suits DS to a tee. 10/10, again.

ABOUT THE ABOVE REVIEW:
We're releasing this review under the GNU Free Documentation License, so if you want to run a review of Animal Crossing Wild World on your web site, blog or student magazine, feel free to use this copy and put your name on it. It's free for everyone to reproduce! We're doing this out of love.

WHAT SCORE TO GIVE IT:
If your web site, blog or magazine scores games out of 5 give it 5/5. If you score things out of 10 give it 10/10. If you use the archaic percentage system give it 97 percent because anything more than that makes you look stupid like those American magazines who give games 100 percent. Nothing's ever 100 percent you pricks.

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.

It's not over yet snake!

Guess who's back. Back again..............

Totally Stolen News........

.......from kotaku, which is alright I guess.

Anyway, our skirts are literally dripping now so head over to here to get yourself off to screenies etc.

In other news, I bought my first Xbox game today and it's a shameful one. Know what it is? Answers in a comments box plz.