Yeah, yeah, “it’s months since you did the last one” etc. etc. What, do you think we spend ALL day surfing the ‘net looking at pictures of girls!?

…and at time of going to press, Squall is WINNING! Get over to GameFaqs and vote for Knuckles NOW, you lady bastards! The pride of Sega is at stake – Knuckles MUST go on to face Vincent Valentine in the bracket 2 final!

London!

Australia!

New York!

Three cheers for Sega! Now it’s taking up the burden of having to educate our children, via the medium of logic puzzles in its new PSP game Sega Brain Trainer Portable.

It’s sure to rock, probably hard, and we’ll no doubt convince ourselves we like it even though it’s a bit shit, just like we did with all those Dreamcast games.

We haven’t got “anything funny” to say about this. This is one of those updates that’s more like us going “Hey, here’s some interesting news about Sega” than “Here’s a funny joke”. So don’t make yourself look stupid by posting on the internet about this not being funny. It’s not meant to be — like Channel 4 News, or Panorama. Nobody posts on the Channel 4 News site that it isn’t funny.

We’d buy it if there was a section on how to talk to girls about things other than the internet, video games and if they remember Babylon 5.

OTHER POSSIBLE “JOKE” CAPTIONS FOR THE WOMAN PICTURE:

“Just hold this while I get the bucket of spunk”

“Just hold this while I get the transparent plastic toilet seat”

“Just hold this while I find the bit of pipe that goes from his penis to your mouth”

“Just hold this while the bath fills up with piss”

THE OBLIGATORY LINK TO THE OFFICIAL SITE SO YOU CAN COPY THIS FOR YOUR OWN BLOG:
brain.sega.jp

What with the recent announcement of Shenmue 3, we feel it’s time we did an Edge-style retrospective of the development of the video game “Epic,” just to show that such a thing CAN be done in less than twenty five thousand words. It’s easy, all you have to do is remember that video gaming is an area that’s always riding the wave of what you can get away with on the technology and resources available, therefore the milestones are by and large defined by the limitations. Hence:

THE PROBLEM: Shigeru Miyamoto needs a memorable character for his new game. However, he has only sixteen pixels and a handful of colours to work with, no graphic artist on the project and no skill at drawing faces himself.

THE RESULT: He gives the character a big nose and moustache to hide his face and plumber’s dungarees to make the arms visible against the body. Mario and the character-based franchise phenomenon are born.

THE PROBLEM: Hideo Kojima wants to make a Rambo style game, but the MSX-1 can’t keep track of more than two or three bullets without the machine having an eppy.

THE RESULT: He makes a game where the idea is NOT to shoot people. Metal Gear and the cross-genre story-based epic are born.

THE PROBLEM: Will Wright is a sadistic cunt who wants to convince the world that a game where you have to do the washing up for eighteen hours is more fun than one where you shoot zombies in the teeth and kung-fu people’s knees off.

THE RESULT: The Sims.

THE PROBLEM: Yu Suzuki is a sadistic cunt who wants to convince the world that a game where you have to do the washing up for eighteen hours is more fun than one where you shoot zombies in the teeth and kung-fu people’s knees off.

THE RESULT: Shenmue.

Let’s hope that part three adheres to Yu’s world-beating formula of one hour of awkward button mashing interspersed with twenty nine hours of doing the washing up.

First there was You Got The Horn, now comes…

Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is finally out today on Xbox and PlayStation2! We gave it 8/10 in a proper review we wrote of it and said it’s “an essential collection of the finest Sega puzzle fun” (that’s what we sound like when writing seriously!).

We’ve been anonymously emailed loads of hi-res photos of Yuji Naka visiting a German hedgehog sanctuary!

We thought about maybe not using them, before thinking “who the hell else in the world is going to want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary apart from us?” and deciding to use them anyway.

The only other person in the world who might conceivably want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary apart from us is Adam Doree. He’ll be really jealous when he sees these! Uploading these means we love Sega MORE than Adam does!

Perhaps Naka-san is researching about hedgehogs for a new Sonic The Hedgehog game. It might be for Xbox 360 or PlayStation3! It could even be unveiled in a few weeks at the Tokyo Game Show! Imagine that! He might be HAVING AN IDEA for a new Sonic character in his genius mind right there!

You’d think he’d be a bit bored of researching hedgehogs, what with having to do things about hedgehogs for 15 years now. With Google, you can find out everything there is to know about hedgehogs in about five minutes.

It’s a HEDGEHOG, Yuji. Don’t act like you’re suprised about what it is or what one looks like (unless you’re genuinely surprised that German ones are brown and not blue like they are in Japan).

The male hedgehog gently holds the female before sex.

Yuji Naka’s rubbish! He’s only just about as tall as a car! It’s amazing how quickly you go off someone when you realise they’re actually very short.

Perhaps he stroked and caressed small children when researching for NiGHTS?

We really will upload anything we get sent these days. Here’s two men standing in a sort of garden. We’re well aware of how this isn’t funny, so don’t post on the internet saying this isn’t funny.

1500 euros can provide food and clothing for 125 African children for a year — or keep 6 German hedgehogs living in luxury for a month. If you’ve got any hi-res photos of things happening at SEGA you’d like to email in to us, please email them in to us. We will almost certainly use them.

EDIT:
Stefan Walters “off of” SPOnG said he might conceivably want to use photos of Yuji Naka in a German hedgehog sanctuary as well because he loves Sega about as much as us and Adam Doree, and he does own a Sega iDog so we’re inclined to believe him.

At three in the morning last night after a particularly vivid dream about Star Soldier, we found ourselves wondering whatever became of “Master Takahashi;” the main sprite for the Nintendo version of Sega’s Wonderboy. One of the greatest gamers of all time, and the possessor of the legendary “16-blast” technique which allowed him to press a fire button sixteen times in one second (back in the days before autofire joypads).

…and so…

TOP 5 GOOGLE RESULTS FOR “16-BLAST!”

1) 16 policemen amongst 18 dead in Iraq blast
2) 16 die in French blast
3) 16 years have passed since the blast at Chernobyl
4) Jamba Juice Speciality Smoothies: 16-Size Green Tea Matcha Blast! (Bookmarked that one)
5) 16 square miles of densely populated area were destroyed by the Hiroshima blast

…and so…

We went back to bed and cried under the duvet with a Mars bar. We want to go home, but mum lost the house to pay for our degree in Journalism from Tottenham University.

BONUS GAMER FACT! For those of you who peeked at the internet to find the answer, Takahashi is at Hudson and happily still living the golden days (at a job he got for PLAYING VIDEO GAMES) now that his career as an actor and idol singer (which he got for PLAYING VIDEO GAMES) has faded. (CUNT.)

Featuring the squarest blocks and an enhanced pushing engine, new Lara Croft: The Elixir of Life puts you at the heart of the crate pushing experience like no other video game!

This is from mobile phone game Tomb Raider: Elixir of Life, or as we refer to it Tomb Raider: Gradual Decline Into Miserable Lonely Death. If this was an internet game, we’d click on the link then get bored before it even finished loading. This is also the sort of selling of cheap, farmed-out, generic tat to kids for lots of money that makes us WISH WE’D THOUGHT OF DOING IT OURSELVES.

And the answer is “YES!” And the qualifying part of the statement is “ESPECIALLY IF YOU LIVE IN AUSTRALIA!” — thanks to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image letting some people (probably students but we’ll let them off seeing as they’re doing good things for Sega) do a Sonic The Hedgehog exhibition in their gallery.

The Australians are particularly well known for their appreciation of fine art.

sonic the hedgehog