A beautiful piece of work. It would be at home on the wall of any fine art collector, particularly a 33-year-old fine art collector who lives on his own in a one bedroom flat and still has his Mega Drive connected to the the TV via the superior RGB SCART connection and the Saturn on S-video.

SONIC DESKTOP #6: “I’VE GOT YOUR BACK, SONIC!”

Stunning, despite once again being supplied in magazine-friendly ‘portrait’ orientation. Sadly this image brings back many painful memories of Tails dropping all the rings at the most inopportune moments, so is quite hard for us to look at without getting angry.

And as has become traditional, someone took the last one and made it a bit better. A man/boy/youth called Matthew made it a bit wider to maybe go on your screen better. Sadly he didn’t go the whole widescreen hog, but it’s better than the original.

PREVIOUSLY, ON GREATEST SONIC DESKTOPS:

“UNDERWATER CRISIS!“

“SAFE LANDING FROM ROBO CHAOS ZONE!“

“I’M COMING TO GET YA!“

“MUST… KILL… SONIC THE HEDGEHOG!“

“YOU CAN’T STOP ME THIS TIME, SONIC!“

We like the swimmers. Very good. Very lifelike. We also like the water effects. They are very nice and technically superb. It must’ve taken a lot of time to develop such a realistic water simulation. It really can’t be faulted, even this early in development.

But can you put women pole vaulters in it, please?

This one will do. She’s got that slightly manly edge we like. It’ll make doing jokes about it next year so much easier for everyone on the internet if the women’s pole vault is represented. The game won’t be out for ages, so there’s enough time to get them in. And think of the fun you’ll all have doing the motion-capture.

We arrived back on the “blogging scene” after Christmas with all the enthusiasm of a taxi driver offered half what he wants to go 30 miles in the opposite direction to where he lives at 3.35am. Here are some dregs we scraped up and reformed into updates for some other sites over the last seven days:

This thing which we wasted way too many man-hours doing, seeing as it’s just a boring story about some rubbish old Britney Spears videos going up on Xbox Live that no one’s ever going to read.

This thing about having to poo in the garden if the Sun explodes.

This thing about using new Sony Memory Sticks to hold copies of PSP games, because acknowledging the existence of the rampant PSP piracy scene on an “above the line” technology site seems DANGEROUS and EXCITING to us and will probably piss Sony off no end. Which, at the end of the day, is what it’s all about.

This thing about a pod smokers can stand in to not get wet.

This thing about Americans buying Radiohead CDs even though they could’ve just had it off the internet for free ages ago.

This thing about some headphones, because you can’t not use pictures like this when they come along:

All killer, no filler. That’s the motto going forward into Q1. 8/10. Next week it’ll be back to the normal level of mediocrity.

Yes, there is an AI-controlled character called Zorg in VF5. Yes, it is based on the subconsciously-but-not-purposefully copied off The Fifth Element user name we use here. Yes, his victory quotes are referencing UKR. No, we did not receive any form of payment for this. Yes, it gives us an occasional erection to think about it.

So yes, it is a bit of UKR FOREVER ENTWINED with an AM2 development. We have penetrated the very bowels of AM2. This means we will all live on for eternity, even after the welcoming embrace of death has taken away the pain.

Plus (and we promised Adam Doree we would link to this one day when the time was right) the AM2 VF5 developers themselves “are aware of the message for Blue Sky!” so there could be someone from AM2 reading these very words RIGHT NOW. There’d better not be any typos. Not that they’d know or be able to tell.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM THE SENDER OF THE PHOTOGRAPH:
“I was playing Virtua Fighter 5 this morning when, in one of the easier arcades, a fella by the name of Zorg challenged me. As my camera was close by after last night’s ‘session’ I thought I’d take a quick snap (2304 x 1728 resolution!), as it’s clearly based on you. And yes, that IS a Dreamcast arcade stick and tissue box holder next to the telly. What you can’t see is that the Dreamcast, Saturn AND Mega Drive are all still hooked up. Cheers, Nick.”

There’s no point saving this lot until tomorrow. Let’s go UPDATE CRAZY and make today an extra special double-day. There is no need to thank us for this extra four minutes of effort.

These photos are called “Go! Messenger” so must be about some sort of PSP messaging service Sony announced to try and grab some headlines last year. It may or may not have actually come out and gone on sale. It’s doubtful if anyone at Sony even knows if this came out or not.

It’s transsexual Lucy Liu again. Messaging her extremely attractive boyfriend. We will have literally zero chance with the real Lucy Liu as her boyfriend’s going to be even cooler than that one. How disappointing. We will have to go back to thinking about Carol Vorderman during sex again.

And so concludes our exciting voyage through the hearts and minds of Sony’s German publicity department.

So we did this because ages ago we did this and then forgot about the rest and then found them again. Here’s another group from the simultaneously ground-breaking and soul-destroying PSP promo photo set.

These ones are called “Go! Explore” and illustrate the PSP GPS thing, which may or may not have “come out” by now. If it has come out, we’d be amazed if anyone even thought about buying one.

Here, they are using the GPS device to locate the local crack dealer, or perhaps they are pinpointing the location of the nightclub where they are DJing at tonight.

Here’s one of someone about to get a beating.

That’s using Alan Duncan’s definition of soaring – ie, it has sunk without trace, even in the PlayStation3 solo charts it’s languishing at number 15 this week behind the usual pile of multi-format shite.

So… PlayStation3 owners aren’t buying console-exclusive games, and they aren’t buying Blu-ray movies, and Sony loses money on each PS3 it tricks someone into buying? This “Ten Year Plan” is AWESOME!

And so much for the great plan of flogging extra songs for a quid a pop via the PlayStation Network. The amount of money Singstar PS3 must’ve sucked up has to be immense. At least the PS2 versions will keep selling for another three or four months.

PS:
Can someone anonymously send us the UK hardware sales figures again, please? It was great fun last time! We felt like dead hard mavericks. Gmail accounts are untraceable, especially if you pop into an internet cafe. The Excel document will do. You know the one we mean. Ta.

Award nailed, thanks to last-minute December 31st PR offensive from Microsoft Korea.

This update will hopefully stop everyone thinking we’re gay just because we quite liked Sony’s possibly transsexual Lucy Lui impersonator from the other day.

Don’t like that box art much.

Looks like a race-prepared 2006 BMW K2000S.

Is that a Samsung LE26R74BDX screen they’re using?

Might be a Panasonic, actually. Or an LG. They’re big in Korea.

Ages ago we did this about some staggering PSP “lifestyle” photographs. Then we forgot about the rest. Then we found them again while looking for something else. So here they are.

We hope you enjoyed that little ‘Making Of’ documentary paragraph about what goes on here behind the scenes of UKR. Tomorrow we might tell you about the photo of a robot we have been saving to use somewhere since 1997! Or the threatening voicemail message we got from a man at Chart-Track and saved as an MP3!

These are to illustrate PSP’s webcam. Which may be in double figure sales globally by now. If it ever came out. Did it ever come out? We’d be amazed if even Sony’s senior management knew or cared if it ever came out.

This one’s nice. She looks a bit like a cheaper and sluttier Lucy Liu. Lucy Liu’s nice. Can anyone tell us if it’s worth downloading a copy of that vampire movie which she gets her tits out in?

There’s another two sets of these pictures. We might forget about them for six months, or we might upload them tomorrow if there’s nothing better around. It could go either way.

There is also a NiGHTS stage. And a Jet Set Radio stage. All we need now is a stage set in the bedroom in which we sat and played all the games featured between the years of 1991 and 2000.

It’s hard to know what to say about this.

You try writing a caption about a screenshot of a tennis game featuring NiGHTS and a character from Jet Set Radio. It’s not the sort of thing you can prepare for.

Never before has something simultaneously looked so wrong but felt so right.