…at least that’s what it looks like. Lots of the Final Fantasy logos have an artsy silhouette behind them; a meteor, a crystal, a Magitek suit, and so forth. What the fuck is this meant to be? Have Square started paying Amano six figure sums to ACTUALLY hurl paint at a piece of paper?

It’s actually funnier when you see it in the shop on a full-sized poster where it’s a couple of inches wide rather than a centimeter. Then it looks like every single person passing it has moaned “OH GOD NOT ANOTHER ONE” and beat their head against it till the blood ran to the floor.

Having things validated is always nice. Like when we found out that other people still loved SEGA and it made us feel less like outcasts. So discovering Girls of Counter-Strike is pretty amazing and life-affirming.

Even though they sound like screechy American teens, it would appear that the majority of Counter-Strike players are young sexy women, dressed in see-through negligees and pink panties with “INSERT COIN HERE” written on.

“GirlsofCS is an online gaming community and nude pinup gallery. We are out to empower female gamers by eliminating the negative online stereotypes towards them.” We’re almost speechless in admiration for whoever wrote this. We would like to shake the hand of the woman who wrote this, because it CLEARLY IS a woman who did, and not a man; a young, scantily-dressed woman. Making an O shape with her mouth and doing stuff with her tongue whilst fingering the scroll-wheel on the mouse and PWNING n00bs.

MySpace continues to astound us and justify our stalking hobby: LOOK! There’s an entire community of HAWT 18 YEAR-OLD CS PLAYING HONEYS. All of them could potentially be our she-bitches.

She IS REAL. The world will know this when we bring her to our house, where we will care for and endlessly photograph her. We will even be gentle and sensitive to her as she sobs in the shower while trying to scrub off the SHAME with bleach.

MORE PHOTOS OF TEENAGE AMERICAN ‘BABES’ WHO LOVE COUNTER-STRIKE:

DIRTY.

DIRTY.

DIRTY.

DIRTY.

DIRTY. Ultimate MySpace stalker resource update provided by guest updater The Cap’n.

Or a snake, as they’re also known. Plus a few bonus ones of Lara Croft Model Karima Adebedidebidet from sexy angles as a sort of Easter gift. Just like the egg, the sperm also symbolises rebirth. So release some. Release some sperm for Jesus (but not while thinking of Jesus, as that’s (a) gay and (b) against the law).

This one’s a bit rude. You can see the bit where her leg turns into her bottom. Respect is due to the photographer for taking the risk of kneeling down to get it.

She’s making eye contact with the kneeler. She’s probably thinking “Oh god, he can see up my shorts. Some sad loser is going to post this on the internet.”

That’s better.

Does anyone else get THE MASSIVE HORN while watching a wet Lara Croft emerge from the water in Tomb Raider: Legend? She’s got big tits, a big arse, strong arms and looks amazing when water is dribbling all down her hot body. We’ve actually considered having a wank over a video game, for the first time since Blaze flashed her knickers in Streets of Rage.

This makes us want to write erotic fan fiction:

See? Are you hot, baby? Does this do it for you too, honeykins? If you’ve recently considered having a wank over Lara Croft despite being nearly 33 years old, please get in touch. We can almost certainly be friends.

This is embarrassing. Like that whole year we wore women’s jeans without realising. The UK Animal Crossing Wild World TV ad is amazingly female-centric, featuring such exclusively female pursuits as:

LOOKING AT THE LOVELY SKY!

SMILING AIMLESSLY!

HAVING FRIENDS!

BEING IN THE KITCHEN! (good, positive role model for young girls)

GETTING REALLY DRUNK AND GETTING OFF WITH YOUR MATES AND OTHER MEN FROM THE INTERNET EVEN THOUGH SHE SAYS SHE’S STILL A VIRGIN! (not pictured)

BEING HAPPY!

And so on. We’re off to play Halo for a bit until the urge to phone people “just to catch up” wears off.

ELSEWHERE IN ANIMAL CROSSING:

Spong has had an entire AC advertorial makeover that’s pretty damn cool (for an internet advert).

Neo_Kitty has been working on her fish collection.

Then SHIT LIFESTYLE BRAND Joystick Junkies would like to hear from you! You might be able to help them sell their shite t-shirts that feature such genius designs as a logo that says “Activision”.

Which, reading between the lines, means “We’d like to get some photos of pretty girls in the office. We will then invite the prettiest ones to our parties and try to have sex with them after giving them lots of vodka.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS IDEA:

It’s six months too late

There are no girl gamers left

It’s for “Joystick Junkies”

By special guest updater The Cap’n.

With the onslaught of new SEGA-made hardware and toys running worryingly low – much like the porn-to-non-porn-application ratio on our hard drives – we thought we’d treat everyone to this. The SEGA PUNCHING BAG.

It’s built for HEAVY DUTY play, this is clearly important because it’s written in UPPER CASE LETTERS. Even in the 1960s SEGA knew how to market their hardware. Notice the pseudo-Nazi type on the SEGA logo. World War you say? 25 years ago? Japanese war crimes? What fanciful madness is this?

Nice, but we’d rather use a woman’s stomach. It’s free, apart from a bit of guilt but that goes away after the first few times.

This is also what the inside of a Sega Saturn looks like.

And here it is, looking in better condition than our poor Saturn, which has remained in confinement since the unfortunate Fighting Vipers incident in November 1996. That and the whole PlayStation bribing everyone in the world thing.

WE STOLE THE PICTURES FROM HERE:
http://marvin3m.com/arcade/segabox.htm

Like everyone else, we sort of assumed it was going to be a bit shit after playing the first level for five minutes so ignored it.

BUT!

It’s got NiGHTS in it!

It’s got CReAM in it!

It’s got ULaLA in it! Apparently because the game was developed by the part of Sonic Team that used to be United Game Artists (the Space Channel 5 heroes) before they were merged into Sonic Team’s division.

It’s the Sega A-Team! We’d have sex with all three of them and their monkey. Screenshots tomorrow*.

OFFICIAL CHARACTER BIOS HERE, AS IF YOU DIDN’T ALREADY KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THEM:
SONIC RIDERS

*Or in six months, if there isn’t a cheat to unlock everything.

We were planning a fantastic April Fool update where we were going claim that we got a mate at university to put a Gizmondo in a particle accelerator and smash it with so much force that it actually tore the fabric of reality. If we’d done it it would have been fantastic. On the one hand nobody would suspect that we made up something so stupid about something so worthless. On the other hand it would have satirised the miserable efforts at hit-grabbing of other sites to a bloody pulp, to the extent that we’d never have had to put up with another “LOL WE BOUGHT A 360 AND SMASHED IT UP ON CAMERA PLZ CLICK OUR BANNERS” shitfest ever again.

Straight away we hit problems, though. For a start we picked on a Japanese University because almost nobody would be able to check the validity of the story. However, we quickly found out that we don’t speak enough science to know which of our pictures of “KEK” is the genuine article.

We reckon it’s this thing, but we have nothing to base that on but the fact that it looks like the one that you shoot Nemesis with at the end of Resident Evil 3.

Even worse was the fact that we’d need a picture of a Japanese person holding a Gizmondo. People holding Gizmondos, let alone PHOTOS of them are almost non-existent (unless they’re MiniMe or have huge tits). A Japanese person holding one? The plausibility event horizon has been breached.

That’s when we found it. Way back from the mists of May 2005, a story stranger than fiction and a million times more soul-crushing than any tedious internet April Fool photoshop. The story of a Japanese man who was not only holding a Gizmondo… but who loved it so much that he went to THAT SHOP to buy one.

And took photos. And posted about it on his website. Where he KEEPS EMPHASISING THINGS A BIT LIKE WE DO. We’re starting to draw unpleasant parallels.

From what we can tell, he was amazed that not even world famous store Hamleys have the Gizmondo. Only Gizmondo store on same road as Apple store! DO THEY GENUINELY INTEND TO SELL IN THIS MANNER?

Then he takes photos of it next to his other consoles. He says “People say that it looks like the Game Gear but it does not, AND ANYWAY WE LIKE THE GAME GEAR!” Oh God. This could have been us. This is like that episode of Friends where the mad old man downstairs dies and they find out he was exactly the same as Chandler. Oh Jesus.

Here’s a picture of him playing with it on a red London bus, with the Queen and a smiling bobby drinking tea in the background! He walked around London with it all day dangling from his mobile phone strap, and nobody tried to steal it. Awwwwwww. We bet he went back to Japan and told everyone how safe England was.

ASCII 24 – there but for the grace of God (and 250 pounds) go we

Where to begin?

Distributed with issue 2 of UK games mag Mean Machines, it’s the Sega Mastermix 90! Two kids, competition winners, who were allowed into a recording studio to record their rap record about Sega. A dream come true!

DOWNLOAD: MC’s Nick and Steve – Do Me A Favour (Master Mix ’90) [3.6MB MP3]

SAMPLE LYRICS:

“Master System costs from eighty pounds, 128 colours, three channel sound”

“Check out your local dealer, not for drugs, but for Sega”

“Yeah, we got the Sega Master System in the house, yeah boyee”

“3D glasses will blow your mind, Better peripherals you cannot find”

You cannot get better than this. How we’d like to travel back to the early 1990s, when enthusiasm was respected and encouraged rather than frowned upon.

STOLEN FROM HERE, WHERE THEY ALSO HAVE THE COMPLETE LYRICS:
Mean Machines Archive.