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.

It’s out today! To buy! Instead of steal off the internet! At least, it is in the UK, where OR2006 Coast 2 Coast comes out on PSP, PS2, PC and Xbox. You wouldn’t believe us if we reviewed it. You’d think we were just saying it’s the best racing game ever because it’s by Sega, because we’re those Sega-loving spastics from off the internet who love everything that’s by Sega.

We’ve dug that hole for ourselves very well. So here are loads more screenshots of Xbox OutRun2006 we took for fun. Judge for yourselves.

The game uses the OutRun2 SP rules, which means (a) slipstreaming and (b) gentler impacts with the walls when you crash.

For world-renowned expert players like us, the less damaging collisions make the game loads easier, but, remember, the world is full of complete fucking morons who can’t play games. For them, this means they’ll be able to complete Coast 2 Coast.

This is a true story: Last time we were in an arcade, we watched three separate people play the OR2 arcade machine one after the other. None of them knew about doing the powersliding stuff. They all just bounced around the barriers on every hard corner. It was INFURIATING and made us SICK TO THE CORE! Sadly, those are the kind of people who buy games these days. So gentler, kinder Coast 2 Coast will suit their spazzy skills.

The slipstreaming is a brilliant new feature. The cars always felt like they were going at top speed – now, if you’re driving one of the new tuned, faster Ferraris AND slipstreaming it’s faster still. You may feel the car pulling away from you, like when you’re driving a real car too fast down a hill and not paying attention and start to panic. Coast 2 Coast is faster. And therefore better.

AN ACTUAL CRITICISM! But frankly, it’s all too easy. Even the Professional level of Flag Man missions can be A-ranked on your first attempt. At least, they can if you’re good at OutRun.

Please play us on Xbox Live. Everyone else on our Friends list is playing Elder fucking Scrolls :(

Why would you want to spend five hours looking through sepia menu screens about armour when you could be doing this? We’ll never understand.

Here’s another annoying thing that’s only annoying to us, but still. Everyone’s giving this good reviews – which is great! But is also means they’re being MASSIVE HYPOCRITES after slagging off OR2 on Xbox when it came out in 2004. Yeah, so there are new tracks and cars in Coast 2 Coast – but it’s still the same game. It plays the same, you do the same stuff in the same way while it all looks the same. You can’t say it’s shit, then suddenly decide you like it 18 months later. Unless you’re publicly admitting to “not getting” it first time round, of course, and are now making amends.

Look at that! Bloody beautiful! We’re crashing on purpose so you get a better view and can see the sparks. Seriously. So yes, Coast 2 Coast has all the OutRun2 tracks in it as well, only they’re ever-so-slightly better because that bit of slowdown you got in Tulip Garden has been eliminated.

Then you’ve got 15 new tracks, from OutRun2SP. They’re great. Like this one.

And this one.

And this one

Here’s our personal OR2 Coast 2 Coast journey. The first version we played was the PSP one. We thought it was amazing, and still do, although perhaps we were getting a bit carried away from not playing OutRun for a year and being excited about seeing it again. Then we played the PS2 one a few weeks later, which was even more impressive, naturally, and from memory looked identical to the Xbox one.

Then we played the Xbox one. It’s better, thanks to analogue triggers and the better analogue sticks, but even so, the PS2 one is pretty much identical looks wise.

The PS2 one also lets you select component output, if you’ve got your PS2 hooked up to a prog scan monitor or TV.

We haven’t seen it on PC, but might as well give it 9/10 to complete our giving-OutRun2-9/10 sequence.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Today is also European Animal Crossing Wild World Day. Which makes today the best ever day (apart from maybe Sonic 2’s Day) for games coming out in the UK. We’ll be playing that tonight as well, probably at the same time. We love games again! It’s like we’ve come out of retirement for one final year of hardcore gaming.

We haven’t done anything about Animal Crossing’s amazing and life-changing awesomeness because it’s impossible to talk about it without sounding pretentious by saying things like “life sim”. We wrote a review of it to go up here, but it sounded like Kieron fucking Gillen so we chucked it. Anyway, Animal Crossing’s amazing and features life-changing awesomeness, so if you’ve just bought it today you can get all the UKR players’ friend codes here.

That’s about it then. Happy OutRun2006 and Animal Crossing Day. We’ll probably be sitting on our own in a lobby of the Xbox version for a few hours tonight, waiting for someone to race with and inevitably beat. Please join us for an inevitable beating. Email if you want our Gamertag. Not putting it here due to safety issues.

OUR OUTRUN2006 COAST 2 COAST REVIEW SCORES:

Regular gamer score: 9/10.

Sega-fan UKR-reader special weighted score: 10/10.

OUR ANIMAL CROSSING WILD WORLD REVIEW SCORES:

Regular gamer score: 10/10.

Anti-Nintendo legacy special weighted score: 8/10.

Or… it’s creating exciting new revenue streams to drive expansion in fiscal Q4 and grow income from micro-transactions via increased consumer brand recognition and a synergistic marketing mix.

It was more fun when Sega was in charge of everything and didn’t care about making money :(

This is simply more proof that someone needs to give us 50,000 pounds an episode to revolutionise video game television overnight. We will do this by simply BEING OF AN ACCEPTABLE STANDARD instead of utterly, embarrassingly awful.

It’s “Gamerweb 2.0” a name which suggests there was an earlier and even worse version of this rubbish.

YOU… COULD… N’T… MAKE IT… UP.

A sock reviews Crash Bandicoot 3 and gives it 90 percent. When we’re massive television stars (this is inevitable) we’ll be stealing all these great ideas!

We do enough “listening to idiots” on the bus and in the office, we don’t need it all over the internet as well.

THE LINK:
This is the absolutely last time we’re linking to Google Video or YouTube or any of these cocking things, until people get their shit together and start making good ones.

A non-anonymous reader called Tom, who we shall call “Tom”, sent us this link to a woman dressed like Joanna Dark from that New Zealand Xbox 360 launch tour we mentioned a bit down the page there.

It’s done quite well. Sorry, “she”. She’s done quite well. Must remember to stop calling women “it”.

This all we have for today. Tomorrow’s headline is “ANOTHER BUNCH OF FUCKING MORONS HAVE PUT A GAMES TV SHOW ON THE INTERNET” but we might remove the word “fucking” to appear slightly less confrontational.

See this picture? This is what Sony said PlayStation3 games were all going to look like at last year’s E3:

As we all thought this was indeed a MASSIVE LIE about PlayStation3’s powers, as the below ACTUAL GAME IMAGE captured at the recent Game Developers Conference proves.

Just a slight difference then. Ha, and we believe, HA. How stupid does Sony think we are? Click on it to make it bigger and witness the full horror of PS3. Dear Jesus, please let PlayStation3 be the biggest financial disaster in the history of home technology. Thanks.

Here’s some of the stuff we’ve been sent. You might think this is the ‘easy option’ but in fact it’s amazingly tiresome cutting and pasting the best bits out of emails. It’s too much like our day job.

If any of the below stuff is from you, you are one of these:

THING ONE: SOME PHOTOS OF THE NEW ZEALAND XBOX 360 ‘LAUNCH BUS’

“New Zealand’s Xbox 360 pre-launch idea. Instead of a big party we got a custom bus filled with the units they put in the shops. Twenty of them, with released games like PGR3, CoD2, DOA4, Kameo, Tiger Wood and a demo of the final build of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.”

“They also had giveaways (trucker hats, armbands, lanyards) and some chick dressed up as Joanna Dark (no photos of her).”

THING TWO: A LINK TO THE ‘RUB RABBITS’ FLASH GAME

http://www.the-rub-rabbits.com/minigame/en/index2.html

THING THREE: A HUGE PSP AD BANNER ON A BUILDING IN MANCHESTER

“I took it in Manchester. Feel free to do what you like with it.”

THING FOUR: A REINTERPRETATION OF THE ‘EMILY BOOTH’ MAGAZINE COVER

“Hidden message in the Emily Booth cover.”

THING FIVE: MAN IN JAPAN SPOTS SEGA iDOG AND iFISH

“I spotted the now infamous Sega product Homestar in a shop in Japan today. Lo and behold, what was next to it? The Sega Toys duo of iDog and iFish. I’ve got no idea what they do but it’s nice to see Sega catering for the iPod generation, right? Plus they were in a sale too! That makes me sad.”

THING SIX: THOSE OLD PHOTOS OF GIRLS AND GAMES CONSOLES

“Just wondered what you thought about these piccies…”

http://www.siliconera.com/2006/03/04/the-girls-of-gaming

THING SEVEN: EMILY BOOTH ON TV!

“Well i don’t know if this is good or bad news but Miss Booth can still get some kind of televised work. She can now be found on some crappy Sky quiz channel called iplay, on channel 166 i think. Oh my surprise when her face popped up at 3 in the afternoon when i was flicking through the channels. Well its like the world has turned full circle with her back on unknown television but at least on LiveTV she nearly got her kit off!”

“No wonder she has been selling her fanny encrusted wares on Ebay, times are truly hard.”

“I have enclosed some poor pics that i took with my Sony Ericsson, also it would appear that times are hard for Nipper the dog also, as he appears to have taken up a part time job outside of HMV with her.”

“Hope you enjoy, sorry if it’s nothing to wank over.”

THING EIGHT: POPSTATION SPOTTED

“Exclusive PSP Redesign spotted!”

“This was probably not worth the soul rending effort it took to actually get the photo off of my fucking phone.”

THING NINE: LARA CROFT, DESIGN LEGEND

“I received this email from the Tomb Raider mailing list. So far as I can tell, the first Tomb Raider game is a candidate for BBC Culture Show’s Design Quest whatever. Not being Brit I have no idea what that is, but it may be worthy of your interest.”

“Somewhat amusing:”

“‘Equally important to its success was the skill with which the designers and animators at Core Design depicted its central character, Lara Croft, as a post-feminist heroine’.”

“…Says the BBC site, refering to the original misshapen Lara of course.”

“Also since when are videogames considered cultural?”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/cultureshow/designquest/vote/

THING TEN: TWO SEPARATE EMAILS ABOUT GIZMONDO

On the way back from E3 last year I ended up sitting next to a Gizmondo PR. I pretended to be asleep or absorbed in my plethora of handheld consoles in order to avoid having to speak to them, but I did listen in when he was speaking to some European web journo sitting on his other side. During that conversation I found out that the PR’s favourite game ever was the vertical shooter that was exclusive to Gizmondo because “all these new games are rubbish. I like them old school. Alpha Blaster (I just made up the name, I can’t be bothered to remember it or look it up) is brilliant because it’s old school.” I also found out that his favourite game from the show was Okami. He said it was “the first game on the PS2 that I’ve seen that actually looks any good. I haven’t liked anything else on PS2 till now.”

Yours,
An anonymous industry person.

EMAIL 2:

Just a quick word to say I used to work at the Cheadle’s office of Gizmondo and the story put forward so far is completely true.

The problem was never the people in the development studios (well apart from maybe the Swedish studios who didn’t actually release or finish anything) all the ex-Warthog staff, and to be fair the studio managers as well were constantly fed reports that ‘everything was fine’ and that ‘this is just a small mishap’. Of course if a company doesn’t even talk to their employers, let alone about the state of business, then employees themselves have no way of knowing how desperately bad things are. After all the company had just signed a 14 year lease on the studio building and had invited designers around who were planning to remould the studio into the theme of a giant Gizmondo with curvy desks and floors. oohh..fancy!

I think one of the more laughable situations for me personally however was when a time came around where the company basically admitted that the people in head office had no idea what they were supposed to do ( I suppose when you fill the company with models, cars, race horses and what not it may get a tad confusing). As a result everyone in the company had to fill out a form detailing exactly what they’re role was within the company and whom they were answerable too (I guess the horse was at a slight disadvantage). At this point we were assured that any staff cuts would be purely in the administrate roles at Head Office. Maybe the clever people in charge got confused, maybe they thought the Head Office was in fact in Cheadle, however the very next week the whole studio was given a months notice.

When the rumours of redundancies first surfaced the person in charge of Human Resources (I.e the person who is supposed to represent and look after the employees throughout the company…but maybe she forgot that as well) thought ‘sod it’ and went off on her holiday knowing full well the situation everyone was in. Not once did anyone from head office show any concern for the employees in the development studios, nor during the ‘consultancy period’ did they think to further ‘consult’ staff about what was going on (they were all too busy covering their secretary’s in silly-string for Christmas cards).

All in all a interesting experience! Although I can understand how the company might have been able to convince investors at the time (being able to show them a product and a couple of games and saying ‘look! we -are- making something really!’) I dread to think that somehow the people responsible will move on to other projects in the future and secure even more investor money to continue their manipulative lifestyle (and maybe buy the remaining 398 Ferrari Enzos!),

Also you might be interested to know, not happy with playing the world once, rumour has it that Carl Freer is in the process of starting a new company! http://www.xeromobile.com/. (http://www.gizmondoforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5469&st=0) Not sure what they are about yet however they seem to be very keen to gather investors at present. Another Gizmondo like scam I hear you say? Most likely, I suppose $3.45m salary isn’t enough and the guy does still have to keep with insurance payments on his $115,662 car.

I’d prefer to stay anonymous for now thanks.

THING ELEVEN: “VITAL INFORMATION CONCERNING MICHAEL JACKSON AND THE DESTRUCTION OF PLANET EARTH”

“Check this out. It’s the fucking shit.”

http://www.hcn.zaq.ne.jp/cabic508/rsf/

“Your servants, Phil and Muffin”

FINAL THING: A SONIC THE HEDGEHOG WINAMP SKIN

“You’ll probably like this:”

http://www.winamp.com/skins/details.php?id=147154

“Yay!”

Yay for you. Nice work, scouts. See you in [time period until we can be bothered to do it all this tiresome cuttin’ an’ pastin’ an’ image resizin’ again].

ONE FINAL CONCERN
We’re worried we’ve spunked too much good stuff in one update, which will lead to the internet’s “interesting reserves” being fully depleted by summer. So we might never do this again.