How does this affect UKR?

It doesn’t. Hooray! There now follows a dull but factually correct account of the UKR/Shiny Media period, for those of you who like paying attention to the press releases. Don’t worry, this isn’t today’s proper update. You do not have to read it.

THE SHINY MEDIA STORY
By Gary J. Cutlack

In June of 2007, high on venture money, Shiny Media bought ukresistance.co.uk and IdiotToys.com off me for a large-ish, but not life-changing, sum of money. This made me go like this:

:)

Two-thirds of the cash was paid on completion of the deal – on the day I started working for them full time – with the final third payable after I’d been at the company for one year, just in case I went mad and run off as soon as they paid me.

Everything was good for a bit. I worked from home four days a week, went berserk on Xboxer to the delight of hardly anyone, and enjoyed pretending to know about gadgets on Tech Digest – while actually being paid to update Idiot Toys and UKR. Happy days were there.

After nearly a year, in April of 2008, it became clear that Shiny was having financial problems as it chopped freelance budgets for the second or third time since I’d started, closed sites and dumped many good people, so I offered them the olive branch of giving me UKR.co.uk back in return for me waiving the final third of the payment.

They agreed. Which again made me go like this:

:)

It was doubly great, as UKR was 48 hours away from being switched to the utterly horrendous Shiny Media template of terror with an “outsourced Romanian web developer” (YES, REALLY!) apparently in charge of putting the UKR content onto the Shiny content management system.

Thank Christ that never happened, eh?

And that was that. I got to work from home, called a cunt on YouTube 10,000 times, while Shiny got pretty much nothing and is now apparently dead in its current form.

The end.

Has anyone who is interested in this sort of thing got any questions?

Former PlayStation man erroneously associated with “excellence”.

Just wrap it up in bubble wrap and post it back.

Children. Rubbish. The only advantage they have on adults is the fact they’ll win at life, due to dying later. Plus telly is better these days. No ‘Ceefax’ mornings for them.

“I went to the Videogame Nation exhibition in Manchester, at the Urbis, yesterday. Not bad but I would have been pissed off if I had paid money to get into it. One interesting bit is the ‘Design your own game cover’ bit, where they have a stack of A4 paper and some felt tips. This is ‘Cooking Mama with Sonic’ by Libby, age 7.”

“‘R U as speedy as Sonic?’, by Rachel from Billingham”.

“‘Where is F-Zero?!’, by Anonymous”.

“‘Single Working mother 2’, by some pervert. Other highlights included an area marked ‘Over 18s only’ that I saw a kid, probably about 12 year old, corrupting his mind with GTA4, and LittleBigPlanet with a broken PS3 controller” – LewieP.

ARTISTIC REVIEW:

REVIEW: Clever awareness of brand extensions from Libby, who shows a great eye for the sales potential of mass-market tie-ups with this genre-defying creation. Her canny emphasis on Sonic would open up the ‘Mama’ brand to an entirely new audience of SEGA and Sonic fans, helping the series earn new followers – and could lead to special editions featuring the likenesses of other games characters. Libby has not just suggested a piece of boxart, she has broken down the staid boundaries and smashed through the limits of conventional thought that would contain and limit the entire industry.

REVIEW: Where indeed? The question posed by Anonymous here is one being asked by myriad Nintendo fans the world over, as they attempt to convince themselves they’re happy playing Wii Fit. Where’s F-Zero? Where next for Nintendo now it’s ditching – and seemingly embarrassed by – its traditional userbase? Where next, perhaps, for the viewer, who, feeling disenfranchised by Nintendo’s sudden change in direction, may be left questioning their personal place and relevance to the modern games industry?

REVIEW: The question bursts through the artwork and attacks the subconscious of the would-be gamer. Am I as fast as Sonic? Would this game tell me? Could this game educate AND entertain me? By focussing on the unarticulated insecurities of the viewer, Rachel both challenges and reassures the viewer that, yes, they may well not be as ‘fast’ as Sonic but the ability to reach one’s own potential personal ‘top speed’ lies within us all and simply requires an adequate catalyst to release it. Could this game be that catalyst? Could ‘R U as Speedy as Sonic?’ be the trigger that leads to a physical and emotional uplift for the player, ushering in a positive new era for their entire life outlook? An extremely powerful piece.

REVIEW: Would.

A simplistic scene that *may* have been slightly impressive on a home computer in 1988. May have been. We can’t remember longer ago than 1992 any more.

“I’m doing it! I’m playing a game!”

Some bloke called “Manu” has alerted us to the existence of this – a superb collection of video game t-shirts. Superb, that is, if you haven’t graduated to wearing proper clothing for adult males yet, like, say, long-sleeved shirts with collars accompanied by jumpers with no obvious branding on them.

Imagine a time when dreary, long-sleeved black shirts were in fashion. That, children, was the early-to-mid 1990s. Not many of these will have survived in their original, unwashed black state.

The shirts are not for sale. They are too important. We understand that.

Let’s all get angry about SEGA blowing all its money on this again.

LINKS TO ALL THE SEGA-RELATED ONES:
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=124
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=2
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=5
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=12
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=30
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=44
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=58
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=61
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=67
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=84
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=96
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=101

How DARE IT harm lovely clown-faced Christina!

We would quite like to injure Christina Aguilera with a Wii Remote. Not badly, just so it’d be a bit uncomfortable for her to sit down the next day.

“Exclusive” in that no one else would want them. Or even bother downloading the 8.32MB ZIP file. Or would actively solicit material like this in the first place. Let’s just say there wasn’t a fierce bidding war with Kotaku over the rights to upload these with a 24 hour exclusivity agreement in place.

In fact, our main interest in these photographs is the way they accurately document the computer desks and set-ups of men in the year 2009.

Look, the camera has accidentally focused on the Samsung monitor instead of the small child’s toy! This update is coincidentally also being produced on a Samsung monitor. A SyncMaster 206BW if you want to look it up and feel a little bit closer to the UKR machine. It has a squarer bezel than Jonathan’s later model.

We hope Tails is being ironic when he pulls this expression. Otherwise, he’s just a bit of a tosser.

Anyway, that’s our stream of consciousness, first-draft opinions done with. Over to “Jonathan” for his actual commentary.

“I can’t remember if you ever did a post on these (I thought you must have since it constituted actual Sega-related news at the time, but I couldn’t find one) but in February last year some reasonably okay looking Sonic vinyl figures to be made by some people called ‘First4Figures’ were announced.”

“About a year later Forbidden Planet started actually offering them for sale on their website (only the Knuckles one is still there, for some reason, and even that’s currently on pre-order). Seeing as my birthday was coming up, they weren’t too expensive, and it wasn’t like I was ever going to get another girlfriend anyway, I decided to treat myself to them.”

“Somehow it took until today for them to actually arrive. So long that I had completely forgotten that I’d ordered them, and any of the initial excitement had long-since faded. As had any excitment for Sonic in general, in fact, as I’m pretty sure most of the internet was as nonplussed as I was by the announcement of Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing or Sonic and Mario at the Winter Olympics or whatever the hell the latest game is.”

“Actually, make that excitement for videogames as a whole. But I’m sure you don’t care about that, here are some mediocre photos of my ill-gotten winnings. They’re in a zip file with a funny name. It’s slightly too big for me to attach so here is a download link” [WE CAN CONFIRM HE DID AT THIS POINT PROVIDE A DOWNLOAD LINK TO A ZIPPED FILE OF IMAGES]

“As you can hopefully see, the figures are sort of nice, and I suppose they’re just about worth a little under a tenner each if you’re really sad, but I’m no longer sure why I allowed myself to buy them.

“The big Sonic one on the First4Figures website would’ve been nicer, but I’m not paying £100 for that. Or even $100, which will probably be about £100 anyway but tomorrow if things keep going the way they are.”

“Hopefully this isn’t too boring. If you don’t put it on your nice website I hope it at least amuses you for a couple of minutes” – Jonathan.

It was pretty boring, to be honest, Jonathan, but we’re in a mental place right now where the more boring a thing is the better entertainment value it provides as we imagine people reading it and being bored to the point of extreme anger.

We sent Jonathan a separate thank you email yesterday, so there’s no real need to say thanks again here.

Think RPGs are dull? Think again. Imagine them stripped of all sensory embellishments. Imagine them reduced to core numbers and sums. Imagine it on Excel. Is your imagination ON FIRE yet?

Found by suspicious book-reading resident “Weatherbox” who stumbled across it while… god knows.

Comes bundled with a copy of ‘Nintendo Urban Pursuits’, which includes ‘Cosh the Newsagent’, ‘Tag the Bus Stop’, ‘Pepper Spray the Kebab Shop Man’ and ‘Throw Chips at the Poor Old Woman on the Bus’.

Out in Japan in a couple of weeks. Looks like the novelty of trying to point a cursor at a screen has finally worn off, hence the emergency alternate colour casing plan being put into action.

Things have been getting way too interesting around here, what with all the aspirational lifestyle images and youth-oriented product news.

So…

“From my holiday in Cinque Terre, Italy.” – Chris.

Thanks, Chris. This will shut everyone up for at least 72 hours.