And the 2007 award for Most Blatant Copy of Nintendogs goes to…

*Fumbles with envelope*

Eidos! For it’s horse-petting game Pony Friends! Well done to everyone involved, even if you might be too ashamed to admit actually being involved.

HOW THEY EXPLAIN THEMSELVES:

Saddle up with PONY FRIENDS

The new Nintendo DS title from Eidos

Eidos interactive, one of the worlds leading publishers and developers of entertainment software, is pleased to announce PONY FRIENDS, a virtual pet game designed exclusively for the Nintendo DS and developed by Australian based Tantalus, will be available in the UK in 2007.

Fill your stables with a choice of 6 real life pony breeds or customise your own. Personalise your pony by choosing its favourite colour and food and then take part in events throughout the calendar year. Immerse yourself in caring and grooming your pony or undertake surprise challenges from a cast of characters. Personalise your pony’s mane, tail colours or accessories with a wide variety of saddles, shoes, blankets and bridles to choose from.

“PONY FRIENDS is a very exciting project for Eidos. We’re fulfilling every child’s dream by giving them their very own portable pony. Players will have so much to occupy their time with from caring for and grooming their ponies and snapping photos whilst riding picturesque country trails to teaching their pony new tricks and entering them into a variety of competitions.” Said Helen Clark, Brand Manager Eidos.

Use the DS stylus to perform a huge range of varied actions; including cleaning stones and shells out your pony’s hooves, brushing its mane or designing a unique saddle blanket. Daily play will ensure that your pony is the prettiest, healthiest, fastest, most talented, and best pony, scooping you first prize in the prestigious ‘perfect pony competition’.

Bear these official figures in mind next time you hear Sony bragging about how many million PS3s it has “shipped”:

1. Nintendo DS Lite: 194,526
2. Nintendo Wii: 83,754
3. PlayStation Portable: 35,700
4. PlayStation 2: 20,995
5. PlayStation 3: 19,996
6. Xbox 360: 7,365

WHAT SONY MEANS WHEN IT SAYS “SHIPPED”:

Moved from regional storage facility A to regional storage facility B

Put on a boat to somewhere else that may want them

In a lorry

In a pile waiting to be put on a lorry

Hidden in the ground

Joy through numbers.

If we’re noted as ‘Away’ on MSN for more than two hours, someone please call an ambulance.

Maybe next year the Oxford English will pick up on them.

As it was the day in which we added the word “Dreamcast” into our Google spellchecker custom dictionary. One minute’s silence please:

Maybe tomorrow we’ll add ‘Ikaruga’, then on Wednesday we could do ‘Silvergun’. Wouldn’t want to do too many emotionally sensitive words at once, as the pain is still only barely concealed.

We’ve finally got around to making a UKR TV show for the internet. Enjoy.

His name is Bing Gordon, and you can meet him in person at the Science Museum on January 24 as part of the Game On exhibition.

You could ask him, say, what’s so creative about doing 20 FIFAs a year, or, say, ask him when he’s going to stop charging people money for new sets of skins for The Sims that must’ve taken someone in the office a couple of hours to knock together.

This, sadly, is what Bing looks like:

If this was still 1996 we’d make some sort of ‘Joey Deacon’ reference. Sadly, those days have passed.

Here’s a nice shot of Bing’s gormless face, in case you want to use it as an avatar on whatever social networking site you spend all day aimlessly reloading to see if any girls have replied to something you said.

By releasing UEFA Champions League 2006-2007. It’s FIFA again, only someone in the office typed in a few new team names so it seems a bit different from the last 50 FIFAs:

And a freelance artist came in for half a day to swap the kit colours around.

Today is an exciting day for SEGA Amusements and Alan Smith – Alan has joined SEGA’s UK arcade division as head of the New Business Division! That’s an awesome job title, plus he’ll get business cards with the SEGA logo on. Imagine that.

Sadly there’s a small amount of personal humiliation to go through first, involving that rubbish wonky-eyed Sonic statue SEGA got some local kids to make:

ASSUME THE POSITION. After this, he has to take off his clothes and run around the building four times. This has been part of the SEGA initiation since the 1970s.

Sega’s New Kid on the Block

Sega Amusements Europe Ltd has announced another new appointment and the creation of a new division at the same time. Alan Smith will take the head role of the recently formed New Business Division. He has worked as a consultant for the company for the past year concentrating on the Dinosaurking title which was launched to great success in 2006.

The division will be responsible for growing card game based kids business, merchandise, and initially launching the UFO Catcher crane into Europe. Smith, with a background in the toy and licensing industry, will also be looking to acquire new licences for Sega to capitalise on.

The expansion comes as part of Sega’s much publicized aggressive five-year expansion policy. The first sign of the policy having effect was an internal restructure followed by the manufacturer taking the spares business back in house.

A well known figure in the toy industry Smith has had an extensive career covering sales, promotion and licensing roles and worked for big names such as Tomy, Hasbro and Coca-Cola. Household name such as Turtles and the re-emergence of Spiderman in 1994 were down to Alan.

On his appointment he commented, “I will be looking to bring my expertise and knowledge of the toy world to Sega and open up new avenues of business and income streams; it is clear the company has massive plans but also that the income forecast cannot all come from traditional amusement sources”.

Paul Williams welcomed the new team member by saying “that he was delighted that Alan had been able to dedicate his full attention the Sega. This opens up a whole new business to us and is a key part of our expansion going forward”.

The full kids’ product range will be shown at this years ATEI on stand 2020; taking centre stage, literally with their dance moves, will be Love & Berry flanked by the Dinosaurking and Mushiking titles.

Alan is photographed with Sonic the Hedgehog, a valuable licence property that will be put to good use in his hands moving forward.

It’s not as good as when SEGA employed a girl in hotpants but is still good news that it’s hiring people instead of making hundreds redundant like it used to.

In a hilarious ironic twist, we’re going to copy something from Kotaku today.

Specifically this update, in which lots of Americans say how many unsold PlayStation3s their local retail warehouses have.

LITERALLY 500 BILLION OF THEM
It’s happy reading time! Here are some quotes.

“The guy at Gamestop said that they have had PS3s all week that he could not get rid of”

“My local Best Buy has a nicely made-up, color, semi-permanent-looking sign on the door stating that they do not have any Wiis in stock. I got to the game section and they had a pile of at least 20 PS3s sitting on the floor”

“Went to pick up an extra Wiimote and a game and found the entire Nintendo section wiped out. Saw about 15 PS3s just sitting there though, no one even in the section”

“I have seen PS3s in stock at 6 different stores in the last 4 days in Northeast PA. 2 Walmarts, 1 Target, 2 Eb games, 1 Gamestop. Most of them had several and they were mostly 60Gb. Its very odd, but I know i don’t want one”

“Best Buy in Barboursville, WV had 33 60GB PS3’s at 1:30 yesterday. They opened an hour early to hand out tickets and no one was there. They had sold one from the time they opened till I was there”

“I work at a Target and we got 14 60gbs in on Saturday morning. The last one finally sold this afternoon. To put that in perspective, our Wii shipments which range from 20-100, they sell out in a matter of hours (if they last that long)”

“My Best Buy store (St. Louis) held 40 PS3s — all 60 GBs — for Sunday’s ad. We sold a total of seven — yes, seven — the whole day, and one of them was later returned. Today we sold three or four the whole day”

CONCLUSION:
We were right all along and Sony is shit and doomed. It’s just taken people a bit longer to cotton on than we thought. We should now Photoshop together some sort of amusing image illustrating how just doomed Sony is. Perhaps putting “Sony” on a picture of the Titanic might be a good start.

Not that we can be bothered.

A BONUS SOMETHING ELSE WE COPIED FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE:
The amazing Sonic Xbox 360 load time YouTube clip: