Youth hit by lightning while playing SOCOM II on his PS2:

“Sam Travers was on his Playstation 2 when his home in Poole was hit by lightning during the electrical storm which hit Dorset in the earlier hours of yesterday. Sam, 16 the day before, was blown backwards by the shock as the roof above him caught fire.”

Thank God he didn’t have an Xbox. They’d still be trying to get to the bottom of the burning crater.

SAM SURVIVES LIGHTNING STRIKE

This gay.

Sephiroth is meant to be thirty two. THIRTY TWO. Now he looks and sounds like a fourteen year old girl.

Look, Ariss actually has tits now. The original playstation didn’t have enough pixels to show all the rasters on the old Arris, which is why she died.

Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. That looks like the heading picture for a sixteen year old’s webpage of Cloud and Tifa wedding fanfiction. You can just imagine it surrounded by animated GIFs and a background colour that makes the content mercifully illegible.

Having said that, it does look great from the trailers. Having said that, so did Thunderbirds.

In two straight sets by Teenage Tennis Queen Maria Sharapova. If only Sonic could make it look this easy.

Maria or Anna? Anna or Cheryl? Cheryl or Maria? Life is too difficult

…when it’s for SEGA, who needs “literally dozens” of Game Testers:

SEGA’s working on a slew of big new titles at the moment and we need people to play them to death in order to make sure they’re as good as they can possibly be.

We have literally dozens of Game Tester vacancies available to the right people, right now here at our head office in Brentford, London. Ideally, we’re looking for people who live relatively close to the office, can play games for long periods of time and have a solid attention to detail. They’ll need great literacy and verbal skills, too.

Is this you?

YES! THAT IS EXACTLY US!

SEGA Needs Game Testers!

PROS ABOUT BEING A TESTER FOR SEGA:

You can say to people “I work for SEGA” and they’d instantly like you more than they do at the moment. Probably.

Might get to meet Richard Jacques.

You could talk about Sega all day and not be laughed at.

CONS:

Only five pounds an hour.

The only thing Brentford is near is a motorway.

Dreams might be shattered on a daily basis.

* Spelled differently just in case The Old Gods are renewing their copyrights without telling us.

This week’s tip is for Kid Icarus on the Japanese Famicom. When you’re in a shop, if you hold controller two up to your face and have an UNCONTROLLABLE CRYING FIT into it, the shopkeeper will break down, take pity on you and lower his prices.

Obviously we’re not going to take a second mortgage on the house in order to get a Japanese Famicom, a disk drive and a copy of the game to test this out; nonetheless WE DID NOT MAKE THIS UP. The source for this material is a history of 20 years of the NES put out by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As God is our witness, this is the last time we take the piss when people start banging on about how we owe everything we are today as gamers to the 8 bit Nintendo.

Our least favourite thing (apart from students that are also DJs) is women who write about the games industry “from a woman’s perspective”.

Sadly, “from a woman’s perspective” always means “I’m going to moan for 1500 words about how I don’t think enough women make games”.

The below article has lots of points where women agree with the woman that not enough women make games. It also uses the words “disingenuous” which is probably something to with periods or chocolate.

IT’S COMPLETE RUBBISH:
Guardian Unlimited | Online | Jobs for the girls

The only woman we want to hear talk about games is Cheryl Tweedy. The game would be Hide The Sausage Up My Arse, for Xbox 360.

Our next job could be mocking up box shots for Play.com.

All over the world ringtone technology is improving, and all over the world idiotic companies are using it to produce a more bass-heavy version of the theme from Inspector Gadget or The A-Team. ONLY UK:Resistance can offer the ringtones that are assured to take their customers back to their childhoods.

10 – Spectrum “Agent X” theme
9 – Pounding heartbeat and tolling bell from Knightmare
8 – Sound of muffled crying from bedroom next door
7 – Looped sample of Jet Set Willy death noise
6 – Slamming door
5 – Sound of datacorder being played for 20 seconds, stopped, rewound and replayed, repeatedly and tearfully
4 – Infantile crying accompanied by heavy, pacing footsteps. VERSION 2 – Pacing becomes more urgent and threatening the longer you allow the phone to ring!
3 – Theme tune from Top Of The Class. WARNING TO COMMUTERS – side-effects include Debbie McGee-induced Pavlovian erection
2 – “It’ll be our secret” whispered menacingly over and over
1 – “Children Of The Sun, Stick Your Fingers Up Your Bum”

Offer open only as long as it takes for Tim Childs to Google himself and sue us. Pre-order NOW! When Volume 2: The 90s launches, pre-order customers receive two ringtones – both Saturn memory card being frantically re-jiggled AND Saturn MPG card being frantically re-jiggled – FREE!

Our update about how rubbish is it to be a games tester got the following response, from someone who knows how rubbish it is to be a Nokia N-GAGE tester.

These people work in Hell, which we can exclusively reveal is located just outside Brighton.

This advert is a temp agency advertising for Babel Media. Babel Media in Hove, Brighton are the sole UK testers of N-GAGE SOFTWARE. There is a special room for N-Gage testing called the “Nokia Lab”. Nokia have DEMANDED that *NO* N-Gages or code or anything leave the room, nor any electronics of any kind (laptops, computers, USB sticks, the works) ENTER the room. You can’t even take a bag in. The room has CCTV and electronic locking devices, Metal Gear Solid style. Even Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all let debug and test hardware roam around an open plan office as long as it is locked up at night.

No food or drink is allowed in this room. N-Gages have to be logged and checked at all times. And get this: if the MMC needs to be removed (old style, before the QD revision) for any reason, Babel Media are required to FILM THE N-GAGE BEING OPENED on VIDEO CAMERA and have two signed witnesses sign the video tape. You cannot use a witness more than once.

One of the Technical Requirements of N-Gage software is that the game must not run at more than 24 fps. Another is that software cannot require more than two buttons to be pressed at once. Every other week and on random occasions, men from Nokia arrive to check conditions. They wear black suits and sunglasses, ala Men In Black. They still haven’t spotted the irony of the MIB2 poster on the wall.

I swear on Ed Lomas’ life that all the above is true, but if you reprint any of this, please don’t print my name. Call me “Jason Ho” or something.

Jesus, it’s only an N-GAGE game not anything actually important.

Thank you Jason Ho, for exposing the shame of the N-GAGE regime. If you have a regime you’d like to expose the shame of, please email in. There’s a link down there to the right. Thanks, and we won’t get you sacked by saying who you are (unless your name is Jason Ho, in which case we are sorry).

A development by scientists working on how best to regulate internet insults this week has led to a discovery that could possibly blow the whole field wide open. It was previously believed that the gay spectrum was divided up from the bottom into two halves – the gay and the uber-gay – with each half further divided into “Gay” and “Ghey,” and each of these divided into subsections of “Gay” and “Teh Gay.”

“The forthcoming generation of gaming devices is threatening to take things out of our hands,” said Prof. DarkVejitto9-11 MA(hons) – Professor of Gay with Special Responsibility For How Much Things Suck On A Scale Of One To Ten – at a press conference. “Previously the field stood on relatively solid ground. Everyone agrees that the Gamecube was definitively teh uber-ghey. I mean, Mario Sunshine? Gay. Pikmin? Gay. That animal thing? Gay. I’ll admit that that Eternal Evil thing where you kept hallucinating your own death was pretty sweet, and at least it had a version of Splinter Cell – but the light sourcing on that was completely gay.

“Now, however, we are faced with the problem of where the goalpoasts will shift to once the Nintendo Revolution is released. Buying a Nintendo console must, once and for all, be an act of complete and decisive gheyness, with a launch week purchase tantamount to an admission of wearing ladies’ underwear. Nonetheless, it’s going to be pretty rockin’ to be able to play Excitebike and shit on it, that’s what Greg says and his dad works for a magazine. It is therefore vitally important that the field expand as fast as the market does – if we become stuck trotting out the same insults over and over, we’re just going to look totally gay.”

REMAPPING THE PLAYGROUND INSULT

Not only does the planned introduction of the areas of Post-Gay and Meta-Gay present scientists with the headache of charting out the new territory, but it presents worrying implacation for those who had, in the past, attempted a unified theory to fit “GAAAAAAAAAAAY!” into the present system. It was previously assumed that “GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!” occupied a grey area in the center of the gay spectrum, reserved for jovially yelling from the back seat of the car whenever one’s male peers admit that Tom Cruise is pretty good looking. If the gay spectrum turns out to be larger than previously thought and the choosing of a middleground to have thus been an arbitrary piece of wooly thinking, insurmountable problems could result from the metric system’s shortcomings in providing a system whereby gay can be divided.

This will bring further confusion to an area already beset by controversy. Dr. Mark Ph.D DIAC of Dublin University has published numerous theoretical papers in which he postulates that using a dark alleyway as a controlled environment and a blunt axe as variable, dividing three gays into two is not only possible but elementary. Mark’s work has drawn fire from other thinkers, however, who cite Russel’s Paradox – an argued flaw in gay set theory laid down in Bertrand Russel’s “Principia Pillowbiter” and stating that the group of gay things which ironically references itself cannot ever be truly gay – as proof that he is a big poof.

KNOWING AND SARCASTIC SPITE TO BE SET BACK TO Q1 2006 AS ADMINISTRATIVE NIGHTMARE LOOMS

The broadening of the gay spectrum promises not just a theoretical minefield, but a logistic one as well. “I cannot overemphasise the magnitude of the task faced by my coworkers [of Clan ne0-apoKKKalipz],” the Professor continued. “Obviously reading is totally gay, but Greg lent me this one once about this electric book that was quite good because the world blew up, and there was this dude who was insulting the whole universe in alphabetical order, and that’s basically what we’ve got to do now. Only this is real, so it sucks even worse. I’d say a thirteen or a fourteen, at least.” His fraternity are as yet unable to project exactly how long it will take to re-insult everyone on the internet with their new, adjusted status. They remain cautiously optimistic that ground can be covered quickly via MMORPGs, but the matter of casual gamers who have to use their computers for work remains problematic. Initially some will be sent their reclassifications via AIM, but left out in the cold will be those using other chat clients such as MSN and ICQ which have been eschewed by the clan as “Fucking gay.”

In winding up the press conference, the Professor was asked whether he could describe what the new entries to the spectrum will look like. He refused to be drawn on scientific details on the grounds that the chromodynamics would take many hours to even begin to explain. However, he hinted that the layman could get some inkling by visualising the kind of colour worn by creepy thirty year olds who hang around PSO playing a ten year old girl.

“Pinkish purple, or maybe some kind of fuschia,” he said. “You know, something gay.”

…on Amazon, by children.

According to Ross Haymes from Bedforshire; “The XBOX 360 offers nothing new in the way of gameplay sticking to the same roots as the fairly unsucessful XBOX and offers nothing that has not allready been seen in a games console.”.

Hmmm, maybe we should wait for PS3 after all. Thanks for the advance heads-up, Ross.

Well done Ross, you’re almost as good as Dan “one star” Emery.

Amazon.co.uk: PC & Video Games: Xbox 360 Console