Two-for-one pre-Christmas sale. We’d be letting you down even more than usual by splitting these up into two individual posts, so, in the hope that two negatives really do make a positive…

“I thought I’d get on the bandwagon with unofficial merchandise. One Silver photo frame. Commiserations” – John Stephens.

“I have had this door mat for 3.5 years.. I have only just realised…” – Dan.

So, they’ve decided to release HOME as a public Beta. That’s HOME, the amazing virtual world that had game journalists and PS3 fanboys proclaiming the greatness of Sony and how it would be the best thing EVER! Except, it’s not. Two years on, it turns out to be a half empty, badly thought out mess (queuing to play a game of Pool?!) and clearly nothing more than a cynical attempt to actually make some money out of the cash-haemorraghing disaster that has been PS3. And with nothing on the horizon, save GT5, surely the ‘nail in the coffin’. Even ThreeSpeech can’t be arsed to Big It Up like they did with Little Big Planet (already being sold for £19.99) Let’s have another little round-up of public opinion shall we;

• “Are there really people dumb enough to spend £3.99 on a virtual house?”
• “What they’ve released is just a huge anti-climax”
• “You cannot create anything in PlayStation Home. You can only buy it.”
• “Pointless, monotonous and poorly executed”
• “It’s like the success of the PS2 has gone to their head and they think people will buy anything”
• “It seems to be a really inconvenient way to launch games and videos while pretending to live in a nightmare vision of the future”
• “..and the load times for each area, oh dear, that was something I didn’t expect. ”
• “I really can’t fathom what they’ve been spending all that development time doing”

Incredible scenes. We haven’t had a spike in traffic like this since the middle of 2003, when someone sent a link to someone else.

Imagine the disappointment on all their tiny, LCD-lit faces.

Celebrating alone again this year? Baked beans and turkey burgers on toast as you wonder how early is too early to drink yourself to sleep and contemplate forcing out a wank over Duffy’s legs and boots on Christmas Top of the Pops?

Each cracker contains a joke. Perhaps we should buy a box to keep us in material during January of 2008.

“To get in the festive spirit I picked up these awesome crackers (six crackers for a quid) when I noticed them in the window of a Pound-shop. SEGA is cleverly marketing Dreamcast through the unusual route of discount traditional festive items. As a blind SEGA fanboy I have clearly got my hopes up that each cracker will contain a VMU (complete with batteries) or a Rumble Pack and given SEGA’s track record of never disappointing its loyal fans I suspect I may have under-estimated the true bundle of joy contained within each golden-hued cracker, resplendent with it’s majestic ribbon trim.

“To simulate the late arrival of online gaming on DC in the West I have decided to wait until our work Christmas do to open these (I know, I know – my colleagues don’t realise how much of a treat they are in for) so expect and update regarding the novelty gift. I’m thinking the hat might be Sonic themed and the joke might even be a PS3 console.

“Photo is in a much higher resolution than the last update I sent you but apologies for the flash reflection. I couldn’t control my excitement and it was a borrowed camera. Enjoy!” – James G”

BORROWED DIGITAL CAMERA REVIEW
2448×3264 image taken on a Sony DSC W100. Much as we enjoy “hating on” Sony, the W range of digital cameras is quality through and through, or at least it was when we acquired a cheap W1 about five years ago. Cost-cutting may have taken hold since, mind.

Here’s what was on the adult’s menu this week while you were here in the garden eating your fish fingers and chips with a spoon. You’ve got some on yourself.

This thing about the Sarah Palin turkey slaughtering incident, which if you haven’t heard about, is actually worth hearing about and watching the accompanying video footage. There’s ONE OF US in the background fantasising about putting her in the machine next.

This thing about a Battlestar Galactica poster, which is much less worth reading about, to be honest.

This thing which is little more than an admission to spending a significant amount of time wanking over Gwen Stefani (photos) in the past.

This thing about metal-detecting. Wouldn’t bother. It did get linked to by some metal-detecting forums, though. If you thought your life was bad, just be happy you’re not a member of a metal-detecting forum and therefore really into metal-detecting AND the internet. It certainly put a few things into perspective here.

This thing about Konnie Huq doing a promotional video for Blu-ray, because you can’t not download, re-encode, upload and embed video clips like this then spend several hours browsing the ‘related videos’ in horror when they come along:

Or maybe 6600 years, depending on if you add that bit on or take it away. Quite a lot of years, anyway.

“Whilst touring the Down County museum in N. Ireland, I was STUNNED to see that Dreamcast had a long and illustrious history in Ulster. According to the display, it ruled from 7,000BC to AD400. Unfortunately it doesn’t confirm that a new console is in production, but we all know that already. Regards” – Anon.

This is going to be the most popular update in the history of UKR, just you wait and see. It’ll get 15,000 Diggs, will appear on the front page of Yahoo Buzz, clock up more than 20,000 WankOvers, be hotter than the sun on N4G and get a link from BBC News and The Sun. Just you wait.

The server’s going to be down for at least 72 hours after this gets out, so we’ll see you on the other side next Monday with 1.5million new readers. Be nice – 1.2million of them will be girls!

“You all seem really depressed lately, so I thought I would send you a picture of my cat using a Dreamcast controller as a pillow. I would have added a funny caption, but I’m not actually clever enough to think of one. There, isn’t that better?” – Eric.

Enemy manufacturing base shrinking! Supply lines crippled! Successful European campaign impacting on Asian stronghold! Unconditional surrender and signing over of all copyrights pertaining to “PlayStation3” estimated to be less than 14 months away.

Sony is also axing 8000 jobs as well as closing 10% of its weapon factories. What a shame. What a big shame. What a BIG OLD FUCKING SHAMEY SHAME indeed. We don’t like to laugh about people losing their jobs, but it’s OK when it’s SONY PEOPLE as they’re not even real people at all. They don’t have feelings.

Like the abandoned homes in the nuclear death zone surrounding Chernobyl, Sonic merchandise reveals a snapshot of a long-forgotten and more innocent age. Did people in the early 1990s really buy one brand of pencils over another brand of pencils thanks to the promise of maybe winning a Mega CD?

“Sega/Crayola contest with Sonic coloured pencil! Sincerely” – Thu Nguyen.

Thank Thu very much.

As part of the UKR screening process that ever submitter must go through, we Googled “Thu Nguyen” – and found that some Thu Nguyens are boys, and some are girls. We’ll imagine this one’s a girl, even though the odds of that are significantly greater than the odds of winning that second-generation Mega CD.

Our European cousins, for so long under the evil Sony cosh, have united as one and OUSTED THE TYRANNY OF EVIL from their glorious lands! No longer are they blindly paying the equivalent RRP of £299 for a shite console based around making films look marginally better than before if you sit near the screen.

Or, to put it sensibly so today’s news-aggregating-media outlets can understand after a two-second scan of the facts, Microsoft has just said Xbox 360 is outselling PS3 in France, Spain and Italy. Here’s a link to Eurogamer saying it, as you’re more likely to believe stuff on Eurogamer than on here, AREN’T YOU?

Expect future Sony press releases to concentrate on the performance of the “PlayStation Family” in Denmark during 2008, relative to the performance of the “PlayStation Family” in Denmark during the 1970s.