Fan Service Inc.

Is anyone else totally addicted to taking snapshots and spending hours on the diorama mode on Super Smash Brothers Brawl? YES! You too! Great. Here are some of my creations for people to use to add some spice to their fan fictions. I’ve given some title and synopsis hints but feel free to use your own okay? And don’t say I don’t ever give you anything, you disgusting fanfiction people.

Suggested Title: Excite Bike Mountain (yaoi)
Synopsis: Purple Excite Bike Man and Red Excite Bike Man are the best of friends. After Excite Bike School they ride their Excite bikes to all kinds of different places and have adventures. Anal adventures. Find out where Purple Excite Bike Man wants to park his Exciting Bike in Red Excite Bike Man.

Suggested Title: Papa Smurf and Another Smurf run away from T-rex whilst Blue Moon tanks and two frog heads stand their ground
Synopsis: Umm maybe rework the title so it doesn’t give too much away I guess. →  Read the rest

The Pokemon Drinking Game [Prison rules version]

Sometime soon, not today, maybe not even this year, but before the end of the world Richie and I are going to liveblog playing the ultimate Pokemon drinking game. Drinking? Pokemon? Game? I hear no-one say. Yes that’s right. Oh you want to play too? Here are the rules:

1) Equitment
You have to pronounce equipment as equitment and skeleton as skellington and vehicle as vericle. It’s all part of playing the drinking game. Anyway, to fully enjoy the Pokemon Drinking Game you need the following:

* Every single episode of Pokemon the animated series, including the films and the Pikachu films (You can illegally download all of these from the internet. I strongly advocate that you do because when 4Kids or Nintendo or whoever finally decide to release all of them in your region there will be 2.5 episodes per DVD and it’ll cost £15 each, and even then they’ll release only half of them). →  Read the rest

What did the Next Gen ever do for Us?

The tagline to the above title being when does next gen become this gen? Yes, already there are rumours abound of what the next generation of consoles might bring to the table, even though for many veterans is still feels like the current generation barely got started. For those of you who remember the last brave days of the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox, it was with bated breath that the new generation was unveiled before our own eyes. And what of it? A number of years down the line (and with a few false starts) how has console gaming really changed and what can we anticipate the next generation will bring? Here’s the topic dealt with in the time-honoured list format.

Crates and/or barrels.
It was our personal hope that we would see the last of the crate and of the barrel, which were ubiquitously used to build generic levels, block pathways and for the henchmen to crouch behind (although to be fair this use was only really for the red barrels). →  Read the rest

E3 to the Grave: Forgetting Good Old Games

E3 has started. Some gamers are excited. Some gamers are jaded with it all. Either way, the lifecycle of many games will start this week. Almost. Well most of them were revealed, hinted at or leaked already. So this is games at their birth. First comes hype, then months of reveals, then reviews then bam! Japan gets the game. Then America. Then Australia. Then most of Europe. Then the UK. This is the beginning of a lifecycle for a game. But what happens at the end? When the game has been played by millions? Bizarrely it appears they dissapear from sight, only resurfacing on the second hand market. Don’t believe me? Check the official sites for Nintendo, Capcom, Microsoft games, Sony, Ubisoft. Mostly filler sites at best with the rare piece of news before Kotaku gets it. →  Read the rest

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Books. They are good at stories right? But books are cheating because the imagination does half the work. The written word allows for a great number of freedoms that other media have yet to gain (parenthetical comments only work in writing). Films? Not so hot. In fact quite rubbish. Even the greatest films are totally inept at dealing with the big issues or telling good stories without the overuse of coincidence or predictability (take for example the new ‘Crash’, ohhhh I didd no dat racism was so complex them shits is deep).

Books and movies are over. Done. A new form of storytelling is here and it is a game. Not games in general, you understand, because games couldn’t tell a story if the whole industry depended on it. RPGs get over this by telling stories that are so long that your mind condenses all the bullshit bits – like talking to dogs or statues or boring cutscenes – into a story that seems to make sense. →  Read the rest

Video Game Proficiency Test

 
 

Video Game Proficiency Test

Examination for Players

For the Following Qualifications:

Hardcore Player status, Bragging Rights.

Time Allowed: 13 minutes, 37 seconds

©1776Videolamer

 
 

TURN OVER PAPER TO BEGIN

 
 
 
 
 
 
ANSWER ALL FIVE QUESTIONS:
 
QUESTION 1.

Below is a table of character match ups for the popular fighting game Street Fighter IV.

1a). Assuming two players of equal skill are playing each other. Player 1 chooses Ken. Player 2 chooses Ryu. What are the chances of player 2 winning three fights in a row?

1b). Player 3 is a veteran of this game series and is the world’s number 4 player. Her proficiency is such that she wins fights with any character at twice the normal predicted chance. Player 3 fights as Akuma and Player 1 fights as Chun-Li. →  Read the rest

Breaking News – Capcom haven’t announced another Resident Evil remake

Consoles have come and gone, hardware market leaders have become laughing stocks and whole game series have gone from groundbreaking innovation to tired old rehash. Yet one thing has always remained constant in modern gaming: Capcom will remake the original Resident Evil. However, today no reports have come from Capcom on any kind of planned remake causing some to speculate that there won’t be one for up to quite a while.

In 1996 Resident Evil was released on the Sony PlayStation to widespread acclaim and simultaneously gave birth to the survival horror genre (paradoxically, before the earlier released Alone In the Dark). The game then went from strength to strength: with a director’s cut for the PS and a port to the Saturn and the PC in 1997. The game then saw a remake on the Gamecube in 2002, which, at the time many gamers and industry top dogs saw as a risky move. →  Read the rest

Pokémon- Literally cannot catch them all

An open letter to Nintendo:

Dear Nintendo (umm Pokémon division?)

My friend and I are Pokémon fans, Pokéfans if you will. Adult Pokémon fans. Is there a sadder thing? Probably. People who are into team sports. All those people who invested their money in property instead of your series of children’s videogames (at least I still have my Marshstomp hah!). But we’re not going to make any excuses for our sad sorry selves. Not to you. Of course we could argue that the whole series should be championed by gamers for it’s visionary approach to RPGs and the ability to take your favourite characters into games that span a number of console generations. For fellow RPG fans how nice would it be to be able to keep transferring your favourite characters from one game to the next without having to start over from scratch? →  Read the rest

Breaking News – Swine Flu Hits Video Games

Today a number of video games started to quarantine characters in fear of the spread of Swine Flu. Here is the latest news our surviving reporters could get:

Sea islands off the coast of the Kingdom of Hyrule have been hit with devastating losses so far. One eye witness account illustrates the horror in the cel-shaded kingdom: “The pigs were going fucking mental man. Snorting, squealing and grunting all over the place. There was blood everywhere. Fortunately, Link was there. He was trying to save them with some kind of pork injection but it wasn’t working. They just kept dying. Oh man the blood.” On going to press, weird rumours report popular pederast, Tingle, has dressed as a pig and is looking for Link. More when we get it.

Meanwhile, in Beyond Good and Evil, shallow stereotype depicting all men as pigs, Pey’J is totally fine. →  Read the rest