And it belongs to Assassin’s Creed creative director Patrice Desilets. That’s him on the right. Patrice is a man’s name in French bits of the world, apparently.

Of particular note is his facial expression. He knows he’s not really supposed to be in this photo of Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond. Everyone likes Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond and he’s being careful not to get in the way of any important bits of her body.

Here’s a close-up of that beard. The trimming is perfection! Anyone who’s ever experimented with facial hair will know that the neckline is several hours of work alone, and the uniformity of length is nothing short of a masterpiece. We can only hope he’s being this meticulous in his work on Assassin’s Creed!

And this is her, Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond, the one everyone likes. Frankly, textbook chin-down-shoulders-back-look-and-smile up or not, we’re still not convinced video game development is the right place for a woman to be, regardless of how many WOMEN GAMERS IN GAMES conferences Aleks Krotoski has organised in her flat this month. They literally just don’t really understand games.

JERRY’S FINAL THOUGHTS:
Still, as long as Ubisoft manages to get acres of press coverage by shoving poor Jade in front of every game journalist’s Casio Exilim while pretending it’s doing it for “equality” rather than “here’s a pretty girl from our office you can talk to about texture maps,” it’ll be worth it.

OTHER PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE REASONS TO NOT LIKE UBISOFT:

It releases the same squad-based game only with a different name at least five times a year, triggering a Pavlovian reaction in us that makes us turn off everything electrical in the house upon hearing the phrase “Tom Clancy’s…”.

Being MADE to review Splinter Cell because no one ever wants to review Splinter Cell because Splinter Cell is boring, too hard and rubbish, and only liked by weirdos who pay fat prostitutes to sandpaper their cocks in dungeons at the weekend while they let out the tears of pain away from the wife and kids.

It has announced a Wii game called Horsez 2 and if that isn’t a sign that another video game crash is no more than six months away, we don’t know what is.

A quite awesome discovery, made by the enthusiastic youths over at The Dreamcast Junkyard. Yet more proof that… you know the rest :(

Sony’s “semi official” – ie, written by journalists paid by Sony – blog recently asked its readers how they thought the first two months have gone for PS3 in Europe.

Can you work out what happens next? (CLUE: You can see it coming from 58 billion, billion, billion light years away with the naked eye on a cloudy night).

It resulted in a totally predictable public backlash on Sony’s kowtowing Euro mouthpiece. Here are some of the best moments. At least they didn’t try to delete that awesome first post. Well done, Kerri. We love you, even if you’re one of those pink-haired, flabby monster-women who usually work in game shops.

HOW PS3 OWNERS THINK IT HAS “GONE” SO FAR FOR PS3 IN EUROPE:

“I think the whole EU thing is going to slow to a halt if Sony don’t get the price of the unit down and, more importantly, *start getting some content on the PSN store!*”

“I’m currently recommending to my friends to wait until September before buying as it *may* be cheaper and there *may* be more popular franchises available…”

“I can’t remember the last time I turned my PS3 on… The PlayStation store is bare, and the release schedule over the next few months is also empty… These are hard times for early adopters who shelled out a lot of cash to play good games as quite simply there aren’t any more to play bar those that arrived on day one.”

“There are no games I am interested in released here, and absolutely zero movement on the online store, and no reason for me to turn it on at all. Sony had better pull their thumbs out if they expect me to spend any money on games.”

“It’s going to be Wii60 everywhere this generation unless Sony can remove their head from a dark place and slash the price by 40 percent in all territories.”

“Well my PS3 is a very bad PS2 machine at the moment because of the lack of new content since the launch I’m having to just play badly compatible PS2 games on it. Played all the launch games and I’ve already beaten Oblivion on the 360 and PC. I’m also hearing from my local game more then half the people who have bought it have taken it back and sales are around 1 per week.”

“I haven’t used it for anything other than the photo album for about a month.”

“We need more games, and better games, all the games that I can play right now looks like they are unfinished versions. PSN sucks, every game has his own way to invite friends, you can not chat with a friend while playing a game. Please we need something equals to Xbox Live and if you can, Better than XBL.”

“Lately its just gathering dust really. No new content just a bunch of old trailers and 20 year old games no one wants to play anymore. And what about the games, seems like all the titles just keep getting pushed back and pushed back, how are SONY supposed to keep me interested in the PS3 if there is no new CONTENT. Compared to XBL the PSN is a joke, really. But after all said and done, I’m happy with my 600 euro folding machine, glad i can help Stanford university out.”

“I want a PS3 – but until a significant price drop occurs there is no way I’ll be buying one… Judging by the amount available in stores, I guess I’m not the only one!”

So when Sony’s US PR goon Dave Karakker blames the internet for destroying PS3’s image, he presumably means sites Sony is paying for itself rather than independent upholders of truth such as UKR?

The funniest thing about PS3’s pointless existence is the one thing Sony’s sheep-like loser fans think will save it. HOME, the cumbersome 3D chat-room system from 1998, that is costing Sony millions to develop – and will then be given away for free. We couldn’t design the total public collapse of a major corporation better if we tried.

F.A.O THREESPEECH ADMINS:
We are saving a regular copy of the page once every thirty minutes, should some sort of ‘server accident’ result in it disappearing or any of the comments getting inadvertently deleted. If you need our ‘back up’ version of the page at any time, please get in touch.

This is an illustration of the broken underside of someone’s Mega Drive power supply unit. Regular readers will be pleased to know that this update represents a new all-time low for UKR, so it can only get better from here.

EXCLUSIVE REPORT: “I have a Mega Drive power block with a broken pin on the bottom. It still works, I just have to pull the two lower legs apart each time I want to use it. That sounds a bit rude I guess, so it might fit on your site. Unfortunately I don’t have it with me so I had to draw it instead. I was going to use a SEGA font to make it look better but for whatever reason it won’t show up in MS Paint. I would’ve put all the voltages and stuff too but I can’t remember those. LW”

A Sonic tie. Not only is it a boring photo of something boring, it’s also blurred and you can only see part of the back of it. Sheer banal genius:

Tomorrow: the underneath of someone’s Mega Drive power supply.

Not all SEGA WORLDs have died and/or fallen into disrepair! This one hasn’t. It’s probably got a good six months left before the “S” stops working and they close the place instead of spending the money on fixing it.

“Hello! When in Nara (Japan) recently – I took this photo with UKR in mind. Then I thought, “Nah, they don’t like stuff like that anymore, forget it.” But, your last update suggests otherwise ! So here you go. Looks quite cheerful, eh ? Fitting for a town where deer roam the streets freely, perhaps. No-one in there though. Enjoy your time, M.”

Cuddly toys don’t count as paying customers, and it looks a bit empty. Has anyone ever seen more than three people in an arcade since 1996?

“Enjoy your time” – that’s a message to the staff of SEGA WORLD Nara. They’ll be selling noodles down the market this time next year.

Folklore is a new PS3 game. It’s a single-player fantasy game that’s brown, even though PlayStation owners want FIFA and Gran Turismo and WipEout, not brown games about being a sexually ambiguous dwarf embarking upon a voyage of discovery on a farm.

Send this one back to the drawing board, Sony. It’s not really going to help things.

We’ve lowered the JPEG compression to factor three, which makes it look slightly worse than the original file so people finding this from Google Image Search think the game looks really nasty. This is the sort of sub-viral anti-marketing we take great pleasure in.

The people of America have dug up PS3’s rotting corpse, violated it up the bottom, set it on fire, then buried it again. If the price isn’t cut by 200 dollars by September 30th we’lll turn the site into a gay Mario fan fiction resource.

NORTH AMERICAN HARDWARE SALES FOR APRIL 2007:
DS: 471k
Wii: 360k
PS2: 194k
PSP: 183k
360: 174k
GBA: 84k
PS3: 82k

Cold, hard, glorious fact.

Which is why another bunch of tools are using it to promote PlayStation3. Check out the number plate:

Tools.

Apparently, according to an email we got from an actual German (he yielded to our superiority by speaking the Queen’s English) German politicians want to ban video gaming.

This is probably a wild, sweeping exaggeration, but we can’t be bothered researching things at the best of times and especially not when they’re in German.

And also because it has resulted in photos like this appearing on the anti-ban site GAMING IS NOT A CRIME:

He is a typical German video gamer, apparently.

The campaign wants to highlight the “real gamers” of Germany and show that not everyone who plays games is a sick, anti-social weirdo. We have obviously focussed on the ones that do look like sick, anti-social weirdos for comic effect.

It’s nice to know that German hardcore gamers sometimes look exactly how you’d imagine them to

SAYS THE GERMAN: “We are doing an online-petition, because they want to ban videogames in Germany! The government thinks that every gamer is a potential psychopathkiller. So we ask people to register and upload their picture. Even if the Tommys don’t care about Germans being f*cked by the government, you still have to do a little newsflash about the site. Why? Because it is sponsored by segaON and consists of totally embarrassing pix like these. It is a comedy goldmine!”

This is what happens to a country when David Hasselhoff is considered a positive role model.

There are also women on it. German women, but they still have all the right bits for doing stuff with/to and some are quite passable.

It’s a shame Germany hasn’t got a Frag Dolls.

THE SITE’S INTRO, PUT THROUGH BABEL FISH, AS ANYTHING PUT THROUGH BABEL FISH IS INSTANTLY AMAZINGLY FUNNY:
“Gaming has many faces – and one of it is yours. Show it: Your picture loads high and shows operational readiness level! Support our on-line initiative, in order to show the public that players are completely normal humans from all social classes and not part of a dark fringe group. We reject the overall condemnation of PC and video games in the connection of acts of violence, which ignores social and personal bad states of the authors unjustified. Players stand together – for their hobby, for appropriate protection of children and young people and against material force.”

THAT WASN’T FUNNY ENOUGH, SO WE TRANSLATED THAT INTO FRENCH, THEN BACK INTO ENGLISH:
“The play has many faces – and one of him is with you. Show it: Your image charges the high one and shows the operational level of promptitude! Support our initiative on line, in order to prove to the public which the players are human the completion normal of all the social classes and not part of a dark group of fringe. Us kids the total judgment of the PC and the video games in the connection of the acts of violence, which is unaware of bad the social and personal states unjustified authors. The players are held together – for their pastime, for suitable protection of the children and the young people and against the material force.”

THAT WAS A BIT BETTER. GOOD LUCK, GERMANY.