The weekly BRITNEY SPEARS round-up of CREDIT CRUNCH gaming OASIS news.

So the last time I did a round-up I mentioned LittleBigPlanet and Dead Space. Both are games that I've been following for quite some time and both are games I had hoped (with all my heard) would deliver. And it seems like i was right.

IGN posted a nice 6 page review of LittleBigPlanet and also in the form of a video review. They award it a 9.5, which is a very, very good score indeed! And judging on other reviews (OPM have given the game 10 out of 10) the LBP sounds like the exclusive PS3 owners have been waiting for!

I seriously can't wait to get my hands on this game now, and the release date is only a couple of weeks away!!

The other game i mentioned was Sci-Fi Survival Horror game Dead Space. This game also gets a good write-up, with IGN's review here. And the video review here. I admit I didn't have as much faith with this one, I could just see it becoming another Haze. But I am happy admit I was wrong. I really hope they put a demo up on the PSN, just because I want to play it so badly. I haven't played a sci-fi game in a long time and am glad that someone has tried a new twist on the genre. The twist being the awesome decapitations you can do to kill or be killed! It looks bloody as hell, which (being a Tarantino fan) is always a good thing for me!)

I am also impressed with the new soundtrack for Motorstorm Pacific Drift:

Alex Metric – In Your Machine
Amon Tobin – Trickstep (Pacific Rift Remix) Exclusive!
Animal Alpha – Fire Fire Fire
Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix)
Black Daniel – Gimme What You Got (Alex Metric Remix)
Black Sun Empire & State Of Mind – Red Velvet VIP
Black Tide – Show Me The Way
Bodysnatchers – Twist Up
Boys Noize – Lava Lava
Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick Sick Sick
Bullets and Octane – I Ain’t Your Savior
Cut In The Hill Gang – Soul To Waste (MotorStorm Edit) Exclusive!
Hervé – Zombie Dance (MotorStorm Edit) Exclusive!
The Exploders - Wolf Cub (Pacific Rift Edit) Exclusive!
Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod
Nirvana – Swap Meet (Diplo MotorStorm remix) Exclusive!
Pendulum - Tarantula (ft Fresh, $pyda & Tenor Fly)
The Qemists – Stompbox
The Qemists - Speed Freak (MotorStorm Remix) Exclusive!
Saving Abel – New Tattoo
Slipknot – Sulfur
Simian Mobile Disco – Parachute
Supa Bajo - Lalula (instrumental)
Ulterior - Weapons
Noisia - Groundhog (MotorStorm re-edit) Exclusive!
Clutch – Pure Rock Fury
David Bowie – Queen Bitch
Death From Above 1979 – Blood On Our Hands (Justice Remix)
Death From Above 1979 – Romantic Rights (Erol Alkins Re-Edit)
DJ Fresh – Chainsaw
Fatboy Slim - Everybody Needs A 303 (Plump DJs remix)
Goose – Black Glove (Bloody Beetroots Remix)
Hadouken! - Liquid Lives (Noisa instrumental mix)
The Hives - No Pun Intended
In Flames - Move Through Me
Leftfield - Phat Planet
Machine Head – Davidian
March – Influence Exclusive!
Megadeth - Sleepwalker
Nick Thayer - Mind Control
Parker - Western Soul featuring Rasco (Aphrodite Remix – MotorStorm Dub)
The Planets – Slasher Exclusive!
Primal Scream - Necro Hex Blues
Saviours – Caverns Of Mind
South Central – Golden Dawn
The Whip – Trash

I really loved the music on the last game, thought that the inclusion of 'Woman' by Wolfmother was a stroke of genius!

Currently though my PS3 is out of action. My hard drive has gone and my new one still hasn't arrived yet. I'm hoping I can find a way to save my precious GTAIV and MGS4 game data though, spent the last 6 months of my life on those darn games!!

Epic FAIL? Erm, actually no.

Since starting my Journalism degree at UCLan I have started to analyse and correct any spelling or grammatical errors I happen to come across. This could be in a newspaper, on an advertising board or even in some writing a friend may have done 6 years ago at High School. It's not always good being this picky for punctuation, my friends tell me to "Piss off" when I point out their missing commas. But I just think at least it will help me in the long run on the road to becoming a Journalist.

Now I also spend a lot of time on Internet forums. Usually for gaming purposes or for simply looking up/talking about the latest news articles. One of my usual haunts first thing in a morning is the website Digg. I like it because it's like a community spreading news from all over the world. Well it's meant to be, mostly it's just people pointing out the mistakes of others. Followed by heated comments below which usually end up in someone having to take a time-out.

A news item caught my eye, not because of the story or picture, but because the headline contained the words: 'Ironic FAIL'.

Here is the Digg story entitled: 'Ironic Fail [pic]'

This isn't going to be a post about the misuse of the word irony, no, that's for another blog. Instead this post is more to do with the FAIL.

FAIL is the new Internet buzzword which joins words like pwned which are thrown around the Internet for more than they should.

There are even sites entirely devoted to this kind of thing: Here

I'm not against the use of this word, but I am in this case because the article it describes is not a FAIL at all. The article in question is a picture of a newspaper clipping which shows the headline: 'Missippi's literacy program shows improvement'. With the word 'Missippi's' marked in yellow marker, as a spelling mistake. The comments for this story are flooded with people laughing at the irony of an article about an improvement in literacy including a spelling error.

But is it actually an error? No, it's not. Missippi is actually Southern slang for Mississippi, and so gives the writer a much shorter word to fit into their headline than having to write out 'Mississippi'. Yes nobody seems to care, they're all caught up in the joke to notice they don't really have anything to joke about.

*Update*
I posted a comment on the aforementioned article basically saying what I just said (but in the space of one line) and also noticed that 1 or 2 other people have also pointed out that this isn't a misspelling. I just re-checked the comments and all of our comments have been Dugg-down, which just goes to show how idiotic some people are. They'd rather discard the truth so they can carry on having a laugh.

"Is thumbelina size 10, On a Wednesday"

It's Wednesday, so for people seriously interested in video games that means only one thing. Yes folks, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a new video review. This week his chosen game to demean, humiliate and destroy is... Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

You can watch the review here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/231-Mercenaries-2

Now for those of you who don't know who Yahtzee is, he's a Brit currently living in Australia who works for a website called The Escapist. He's notorious for hating virtually every game he reviews, and is extremely apt at picking at every minuscule flaw. Oh and he's fucking hilarious!

To say he rips most games to pieces, I usually do tend to agree with most of his criticisms. Yes, the face that you can loose the cops on GTA IV by simply driving in a straight line is silly. Yes, 90% of the Oblivion world is boring and the AI of most of its inhabitants is insane. And yes, Fantasy Land Dizzy is the best game ever!!

There has been, however, one instance where I didn't agree with Yahtzee. That was regarding his review of Metal Gear Solid 4. I game which, in my opinion, is one of the top 5 games EVER.

Yahtzee tends to pick on games from 2 categories of games:

1) The really high profile games. Games like GTA IV, MGS 4, Halo 3 and Super Smash Bro's

and

2) Games that really, really, really suck. Games like Too Human, Haze, The Witcher and.. Mercenaries 2.

If the particular game is from the second pile then you know you're in for a treat. If you thought it was bad, just wait until Yahtzee has ripped it up, spat on it, wiped his ass on it and used it to clobber paedophiles over the head.

Anyway you really should check him out! While your at it watch the rest of his reviews so you're up to speed for next week.


Now on to a quick look back at what's happened in the gaming industry in the last week.

The release date for LittleBigPlanet has changed a few times. At the moment, Media Molecule are set on a 24th October release. Which gives us all just over 3 weeks to get our filthy little paws on it. And I for one cannot wait!! This game really is going to be a benchmark in video game production and user content capabilities. Do yourself a favour and pre-order your copy now from Play.com.

Meanwhile Fallout 3 and WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2009 are building up to be really great games. The former being an FPS/RPG set in apocalyptic Washington DC and the later being the latest installment of Yukes' ever popular wrestling franchise.

Also, Dead Space is still looking great too. For thos of you who are out of the loop, Dead Space is a third-person action game which puts you at the controls of engineer, Isaac Clarke as he battles a polymorphic alien species called the 'Necromorphs' on board an interstellar mining ship. The fact that this guy is basically a miner.. in space.. makes me immediately think of Red Dwarf. And then you read the word 'polymorphic' and again are reminded of that episode- Polymorphs, in Series III of the sci-fi sitcom. There's nothing like a bit of nostalgia to intensify the hype around a video game!!

I really do hope it turns out to be a solid title, though with it being made by EA I'm not entirely confident. Still, it looks beautiful (in a blood and gore, alien spaceship kinda way) and the next-gen consoles are in dire need of a decent space-horror game. It reminds me a lot of the first Alien film, which is always a good thing! I personally can't wait to get my hands on it and scare myself shitless!

Over and out.

"What makes a man a man? Am I a man? Yes, technically, I am"

For some reason, when I think about myself, I think of myself as a boy. Even though I am 19 years old. I certainly don't think of myself as a man anyways! Which is strange, because I obviously am, well, at least in the UK I am. You reach manhood at 18 here, so really I have been a man for well over a year now! But I still don't see it..

In countries like the US, I use this as an example because we all look to the US to lead by example, even though they are pretty fucked at the moment. Fucked, meaning that their economy is in decay, and their choice of leader is generally idiotic. Well in America you are legally a man when you turn 21. Which is a good number of years later than us Brits! Why the reason for such a difference? We only live across the pond from each other but somehow, legally, us Brits walk around being all manly a good 3 years before our American counterparts.

So I got to thinking, if I'm 19 and still think I'm a boy, when will I actually agree with my body and refer to myself as a man? It's likely to happen when writing an 'About Me' section on some random social networking site I think. Like when people put: "I'm an out-going man from Leeds, with an interest in pencils and mellow lights." Obviously something major may have to happen for me to change my opinion of myself. I can't still think of myself as a boy when I'm 25, because it's so obvious that I'm not!

When looking who's to blame for my predicament I looked to literature. Or, never actually having read the book I shall refer to, the movies. One in particular- Peter Pan. Yes, blame Peter Pan and his band of Lost Boys- the bastards! Obviously all this talk of never growing up has been embedded into my mind as a small, and impressionable child. Now I am older, and far less impressionable (well I like to think anyway) so how come it's magic hasn't worn off?

So instead of growing old and accepting manhood I shall reject it. I think you should all too! Even the girls, cast off the shackles of womanhood and live forever as a child! You know you want to. We shall start a revolution!! March on Washington (or whichever your local authority may be) and we can live together in a childish, idocincratic world created by J.M. Barrie.

Over and out.

I'm going to hell.

Ellie Arroway: Why did you do it?
Palmer Joss: Our job was to select someone to speak for everybody. And I just couldn't in good conscience vote for a person who doesn't believe in God. Someone who honestly thinks the other 95% of us suffer from some form of mass delusion.
Ellie Arroway: I told the truth up there. And Drumlin told you exactly what you wanted to hear.

(Contact - 1995)

Religion. It's a controversial topic. But a topic none-the-less. At this point in my life, I would have to agree with Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster).

I went to a Methodist Primary School, and went to church most Sundays. Not out of faith, but because my parents wanted me to be able to go to the best High School in my area. I got in, it was a Church of England High School. And even though I was always pretty good at RE (Religous Education) I think it was sometime during the first years of High School when I started to question what I'd been told since I was young.

When confronted with all the options, I just have to agree with what science has told us.

Which takes me to a book I read recently. I'm sure you've either read it our atleast heard of it- Dan Brown's 'Angels & Demons'. It's a really good book, and I actually enjoyed it slightly more than I enjoyed The Da Vincie Code. It was strange while reading A&D, at one point I was sat there, I was maybe around haldway through the book, and I thought "Wait a minute, I actually wouldn't mind if the bad guy won, if he managed to blow up The Vatican- I've always had a dislike for Catholasism. It seems like an archaec religion, full of silly traditions and corrupt priests.

While having a dislike for religion, it's funny that the majority of films and books I enjoy have religion as a concurrent under-tone: The Devils Advocate (1997), Dogma (1999), City of Angels (1998),The Da Vinci Code (2003) and His Dark Materials Trilogy (1995-2000). Most of these films and books test the boundaries of religion, they question what we have been told. What we have been forced to beleive.

I don't have anything against people who are religous. Nothing at all. I just think they suffer from some form of mass delusion. I think that people are so terrified of death, that the only way they can live their hum-drum, boring, non-existent lives in piece is by beleiveing in a better place. Somewhere they will go when it's all over. Somewhere they will be free of the shackles of pain and be happy.

In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade (Al Pacino) in Scent of a woman (1995): "Charlie, it's all shit."

Over and out.

"Times they are a-changing"

The times do change. There's nothing we can do. It eventually happens. The vexing thing is when they do finally change we usually aren't paying attention and miss it. It only finally hits us on a rainy Sunday afternoon when we have nothing better to think about then the past.

Recently, after a rather mediocre night out in town, myself and a friend- who i shall call Chris, because that's his name, were talking about the usual stuff guys tend to talk about. The gorgeous blond in that pub, the cheek of those bouncers, the price of a chicken kebab and the disappearance of the tradition to never be seen without a hat.

It is the last of these points that I will expand upon, as it was this point that Chris and myself began to discuss. Think back 200 years, I know you won't be able to think back that far, because you weren't alive back then (sadly we can't all be Highlander-there can only be one!). However we see movies which portray events from those times and even get to glimpse at a photograph taken back then.

What you begin to notice, is that every single man in these movies or photographs, always wear a hat. They get out of bed, they put on their hat, and they don't take it off until they go to bed that following night- or if they are dead and it just fell off when their cold, dead corpse hit the ground. What I want to know is- why don't we all go around wearing hats all the time now?

Now I know men still wore hats before the First World War, because you see pictures of them all happy and peaceful, with their flat-caps and pipes, with absolutely no premonition of the horrors they are about to face. When the horrors finally did spring upon them the men still wore hats, but this time out of necessity- if they didn't have their helmet they would surely lose their head!

After the war (or 'ze var', as the losers call it) the men went back home and back to wearing their trusty hats, only now half of them were mad from shell shock and the other half had lost an arm, leg or visibility in their left eye. It would be a number of years until the next big thing to rock England, and yet again it was those pesky Germans back for round 2, only this time we called it World War 2.

Helmets again were a must-have accessory in the trenches, they doubled up as a soup bowl when you weren't dodging machine gun fire or looking for the toes which just fell off your left foot. However it would seem that it was upon their return home that the men of England decided not to don their hats.

Maybe it was because of ze var, maybe it was because they were tired of having hat-hair, maybe it was because they simply couldn't find the right one to suit their face because Topman wouldn't be invented for another 50 years. I'll simply do what I always do in these situations and... just blame the Germans!

Over and out.

P.S This blog is dedicated to the rather cool Grandfather of Miss Chantelle Marie Watson. He's seen Jimi Hendrix before he was famous for smegs sake!

E3 2008: Nintendo Press Conference

I found myself following E3 2008 more closely than I have the last few. Firstly because I am always interested in video games but having bought a PS3 I have a quiet yearning for some amazing news that will make fans of the Xbox 360 and Wii shit themselves, piss themselves and then die of shock. But mainly, because I am as student, who has 5 months to spare, and nothing else to do.

First up comes Nintendo's Conference. Now I don't have anything against Nintendo, I bought a GameCube and thoroughly enjoyed it! But over the last few years I have become to fucking hate them! Perhaps it's because no matter who I see supposedly promoting their product, they always seem to be smiling their faces off and having a jolly good time. When I myself try to re-enact this sense of fun I am left thoroughly without.

However I also believe that Nintendo, and their Wii console, are no longer in the video games market- that's reserved for the PS3 and Xbox 360. No, what they are making are not video games, they're just shit cartoons which require you to control an annoying little character with a plastic baton of hatred!!

Things kick off with Rings of Fire blurring out of the sound system while snowboarding teen sensation Shaun White shows off his skills on an over-charged pair of bathroom scales. This is nice, yeah the music's fair good, he looks like he's having fun, yeah looks cool. And then some woman enters the stage, smiling more than it should be legal to smile, and starts to brown-tongue her way through a demonstration of Nintendo's new winter sports game: Shaun White's Snowboarding (Obvious title I know..).

After some more smiling, Nintendo's Satoru Iwata takes to the stage to enlighten us further on the progress of the Wii. I didn't understand a lot of what Iwata said, mainly because he kept banging on about bloody paradigm shifts and how it affects the world of gaming. He ends with something to do with putting creativity and community together and then leaves the stage.

What followed was a montage showing various Japanese designers and how they came about creating games for the Wii. The game on show was Animal Crossing, a game which I have never got the hang of and couldn't possibly imagine why anybody would want to waste their life playing such a childish, simplistic game. One thing that confused me was the designer saying "Even when you are not there the animals go to bed and get up in the morning". What? What's the point in that? If you aren't playing the game, what is the point bothering about what characters in the game are doing? I don't switch off Final Fantasy VII and expect half my team to be dead when I load it back up because the monsters are still running round killing them, I actually do need to sleep thank you very much!

Then we get to see a revolutionary new microphone, guess what it's called- Wii Speak! Yeah I bet you didn't guess that either.. Anyway the thing with this microphone is the fact that it isn't a singular headset, it lets everyone in the room speak. Which is great, you can be playing your game online while all you can hear from your friends microphone is the particular episode of Eastenders on in their living room. Nice one Nintendo! It's all about community playing apparently, we'll just have to bare with them shall we.

Another Nintendo exec, this time from America, takes to the stage and bombards with audience with some facts and figures. You can't blame them for this, you might as well sing while you're winning. And if you go off sales figures, like some people do, Nintendo seem to be winning. Ten more minutes of numbers and we then get a glimpse of Star Wars: Clone Wars, Rayman Raving Rabbits TV Party and Call of Duty: World at War. The last 2 games being shown played by a group of people who must be having so much fun they can't stop smiling. Maybe they all won the lottery and are imagining how many Nintendo Wii's they could buy with their winnings.

And then I am rushed with a feeling of great dred as the smiling woman strides back onto the stage, this time talking about Nintendo's handheld console- the Nintendo DS. More importantly she talks about how the DS seems to be connecting with female gamers. This doesn't surprise me one bit, what does surprise me is how they have so many male gamers buying the Wii. But then I realised that there is no way they could know the gender of every gamer who bought a DS, so thus putting their figures into disrepute. Aha I won that one!

Amidst the video footage shown is a new Guitar Hero game for the DS. Now the cool thing about playing Guitar Hero is the fact you can pretend like you are actually playing a real guitar and are a world famous guitarist. It helps when the controller basically is a bloody guitar! Now the DS doesn't play by the rules, they do things their own way. Do you get to play it on a guitar? No. Instead you strum the screen while tapping your fingers against a 5-buttoned finger strap. Yeah man rock ouuuut! Err it's just not the same sadly!

But then Nintendo go a whole step further! They just ruined one large franchise- Guitar Hero. But that's not enough- Grand Theft Auto. Yeah that's right, GTA for the DS. An all new story, with all new characters and an all new.... nice plastic box with a bow and free snake. Somehow I don't see how GTA will transfer over to the lovable, cuddly, DS. It's like giving a toddler a flame thrower and telling it the kid next door stole his teddy bear.

And apparently now we are being told that the DS is not just a console, no, it can go with you anywhere! Take it to the park, take it on a plane, take it into the kitchen, take it to Camden while you watch Amy Winehouse punch a man in the toilets. Seems to me like they're taking a leaf out of the PSP's book. I knew they would catch on eventually.

What's happening now? Oh it's some new accessory for the Wii. It makes the Wii remote even more respondent then it currently is. So basically the Wii Motion + makes the controller do what it was supposed to do in the first place. To show off this revolutionary new device we are shown a demonstration using the new Wii Sports: Resort game, and probably the most boring and tedious even you could possibly imagine in a video game. You throw a Frisbee for a dog. The dog has to catch it. Yeah, that is it. The whole concept. Whoever said "hey let's do a game where you have to throw a Frisbee for a dog" should be shot, stabbed and set on fire.

The sword-fighting event could have saved us, but alas it failed. Instead of mutilating your opponent, letting you fly around on a roaring rampage, a la Kill Bill, no, instead you have to sharpen pencils and chop blocks of wood. Such a shame.

Now, look back through all I have written above, take in the disappointments, the failings, the angst. All that is about to be blown away by Nintendo's finale. We see a drummer using the Wii remote to play the drums, a CGI drum kit is on the screen, we say a man using the Wii remote like a Saxophone, a CGI character playing the Saxophone on the screen. Now I know what you are thinking, it's like Rock Band and Guitar Hero: World Tour. They're tapping into that whole experience! Well actually no, what you are actually doing is pretending to play an instrument, and the Wii makes you look like you actually are. There isn't even any skill or track to follow, you actually just choose which instrument you want to play and the music plays for you. It's a rhythm game without the rhythm elements.

So basically it's a music game for retards and lemmings. Are the words WHAT-IS-THE-POINT spiraling round your head too? Thought so, it's just stupid. It's like plaing football without keeping score. It's okay lads we're all winners really, then we go home and blow are brains out because we realise we are not winners, we are in fact- failures.

And failure is going to be my buzzword to sum up Nintendo's E3 2008 Press Conference. So, so long, and good luck, especially if you own a Wii and have been sucked in by this non-competitive style of gaming.

Over and out.