Wrestlevania

Instant best seller. The strapline could be: Help Jade gather photographic evidence to uncover a dark and twisted evil--her mother had sex with a pig!

Just about everything on the Old Man Murray site is worth settling down to with a cup of cocoa. As a flavoursome intro, I suggest you begin your journey here. I still occaissionally squeal "'EAMCAS'!!!" when the mood suits...

That's not how I understand the derailment of the GameCube at all. It was a lack of interest in - and therefore support of - third party developers by Nintendo themselves that choked the supply of games. Nintendo effectively condemned the system with their suffocating rules on standards, quality control and themes--actively shunning adult themes (until near the end of the console's artificially shortened lifespan) when the mainstream was getting ever-more hooked on guns and virtual car jacking. Rightly, Nintendo got a good kick in the teeth for this. Hence they've (sensibly) extended the olive branch to anyone who even so much as looks at a Wii dev kit. And the difference that has already made is obvious; one of the single most talked-about next generation titles is a Wii exclusive--namely Red Steel. But this is getting way off track.

That's where I was coming from with my "platform exclusive" argument. I still think there's merit in the idea that perhaps BG&E was spread too thinly - across much too diverse an audience - to really find its intended niche. I honestly believe that intelligently targeting a specific platform, that supports and accentuates your game's key features, helps greatly in this respect. Irrespective of the game's subject matter, etc. I would imagine a fair number of people simply didn't wish to put that much effort into understanding a game like BG&E, because it presents concepts and ideas quite different from what's already out there. Which inherently makes it a difficult game to pigeon-hole, too.

Oh... My... Goodness..! Shoryuken!!! Has anyone downloaded and played this yet?! Should I be getting my girly knickers in a proper Hurricane Kick-twist over this?!! Tell me!!! *bursts with excitement*

I know (I played it on PC). I meant for it to be platform-exclusive on GameCube. My thinking was that, what with the dearth of GameCube titles relative to either Xbox or Playstation 2, BG&E might have garnered more attention had it been a platform exclusive for the GameCube. But maybe you're right; 'attention' - in the media at least - didn't seem to be the main issue with the game not selling very well. (And yes, I did read the article before responding originally. Just wasn't a very good response.)

I'm not in the habit of (knowingly) kicking a good game while it's down, but I honestly don't consider Beyond Good & Evil as anything more than a triumph of high production values. The game refuses to go away though, so maybe I need to play it through again and see if it 'clicks' this time. I think that maybe Ubisoft's biggest mistake was choice of platform; if they'd made the title a GameCube exclusive, then I'm convinced they would have had a rapt audience.

I'd argue Dr. Jones is far more worthy of a sequel than John McClane, but that certainly doesn't mean I'm any more in love with that idea either. *recalls The Last Crusade and almost vomits*

Re-educate the unwashed masses. And it's an indomitable classic, too--about as perfect a game for bolstering Microsoft's Arcade brand as you could hope for IMHO.

It's exactly as I expected, then. I've been trying to get back into Street Fighter recently after an obscenely long absence; trying to relearn everything, via Third Strike on Dreamcast, is made all the more difficult by the pretty naff D-pad. I've got an Xbox 360 USB controller for Windows which I've played a couple of similar fighting games with, and that didn't fair particularly well either. Personally, my favourite SF peripheral was the MegaDrive's 6 button 'banana' pad; I did have an Arcade Stick II, but it just didn't feel right--it's languishing up in my loft still, now that I think about it... Damn. I think that's going to completely screw the finer technical aspects of the game when playing online. Still, the offline mode against another person will likely be what I play most, so I can't wait to try that out. Happy days! Cheers for the round-up, n0wak.

The odd icon here and there never hurt anybody though...

Fair statement(s). Granted, recent PC games such as Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 - amongst others (I'm pointing the finger at you, Far Cry) - have driven this false message home amongst PC gamers. Similarly, because PC gaming has had a surge in audience numbers in recent years, this myth has been propagated that much wider than before. What's most worrying, though, is that Microsoft and Sony have now converted thousands more people to this kind of thinking, with their obsessive - and deliberately public - Xbox 360 versus PlayStation 3 hardware bun-fighting. However, being level headed you could argue that, because of the astronomical investments both companies have made for next-generation, it was in their core (Core?*) interests to make hardware a key talking/selling point early on. Maybe I've just been following this industry far too closely, for far too long. * I am deeply, deeply sorry for the spectacularly shite pun.

It's annoying that that's not indicated somewhere obvious on the site.

Snob! Actually, in all seriousness, that's effectively what Nintendo are doing next-generation (and no doubt some would argue "comparatively" too).

Which browser are you using? I get JavaScript errors in Internet Explorer, or just a flat HTML page in Mozilla Firefox--is music supposed to be played?

Being a dyed-in-the-wool PC hardware whore, I'd respectfully ask that you cease using your lower colon as a second voice-box. On a more serious note: PC people throwing numbers at each other isn't the deal at all; Microsoft and Sony have willed this kind of in-fighting amongst video gamers into existence with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The most depressing aspect is that sooo many people are sucking it down and then blindly flailing stat sheets at each other, like it means anything. It's all shite, and I really hope even the dickhead MS and Sony execs who engineered this crap are actually regretting it now, too. Once they've dried themselves off from their bathful of well-earned 'bonus' money, obviously. The "best" next-gen games will come from whichever software shop makes best use of the hardware they've got in front of them. It doesn't matter about the complexity of the graphics It doesn't matter about the fidelity of the audio It even doesn't matter about some slightly odd/unusual/revised controller It simply comes down to the games and how they play. All these stat-humpers need to kill themselves, because it's misinformation on a gross scale. Nothing has changed, ever, in this respect--in any industry, whether it be cars, landmines, or hairspray. All that matters is how the final games play on the system you have chosen to buy. And shut the fuck up with all this "mine's better than yours" shit.

Exactly - it's his "supermarket writing" style coming through again; "appeal to the lowest common denominator," and most knuckle-draggers may vaguely recall the name 'Michael Crichton' because of chuff like Jurassic Park, etc. What he's trying to get out - and making a complete fucking two-page hash of it - is this: Ensure that you provide the necessary literary 'hooks' so that the widest possible audience will understand quite what you're banging on about. Not the snappiest of idioms, but you get the point (I hope!). And by 'hooks' I mean 'key/universal references'. It's not hard, really. It's just he seems to have column inches - and, as someone else quite rightly pointed out, a banner impressions quota - to fill. Job done IMHO, so I suppose he's not a total idiot...

Being as we're quite a day-dreamy, "back in my day," kinda bunch this week, I figured it'd be interesting to see what ideas folk had on the subject of favourite arcade games. Specifically; which arcade game(s) would you like to see brought back from the dead and why?

CD WOW! are currently selling New Super Mario Bros. for £19.99, including free delivery. Can't vouch for the service personally, but it's probably worth going for anyway. [Via the most(ly)-excellent British Gaming Blog]

Fucking Terrible Center*? * [sic]

It's supposed to have quite a remarkable difficulty spike part way in, then slacken off - and possibly get too easy - before the end.

I haven't been following the news much, but I was disgusted to hear last week that two Israeli helicopter gunships strafed a couple of Red Cross ambulances. The ambulances were apparently rushing casualties away from the area the helicopters had just been pummelling with rocket fire, and were deliberately followed and then fired upon by the helicopters. Of course, those ambulances could have been stolen by Hesbolah militants, who might have been using them as mobile rocket stations against the ingressing Israeli helicopters... And that's the trouble with wars like this; you'll never truly know what's happening at ground level.

I thought SG:Atlantis had real promise early on, but it just bombed about a third of the way into the 1st series IMHO. It very quickly stopped being distinct from the original series, resorting instead to being SG:1 - H2O Edition.

This guy's directly advocating bland "supermarket" writing, and I'm not happy about that at all. His colourless attempt at irony (above) makes for painfully constipated reading--it's just so fucking dull and dispassionate. Give me total engagement and enthusiasm of the niche over the blank-faced indifference of the masses any day of the week.

Dismembered zombie horse head--obviously it's from a Nintendo game as there's no gore. I like the way you've picked out the detail in the mane with scratchy little white lines, Yuf--very nice. Could I request we have a panned-back version though, so we can see exactly which Teletubby its presently eviscerating? Cheers babe.