Having slipped from 2005 to Christmas 2005 to New Year 2006 to February 2006 to First Quarter 2006 to just 2006, Sega’s killer app for retaking the MORPG market is now simply “2006 (planned).”

We could go on at length about how this sours our already semi-hostile feelings for online RPGs, but instead here is a picture of a pornographic parody of .hack that we found.

Obviously we didn’t laugh at it or anything, so don’t complain that we’re not cynical or hardcore enough any more.

It’s SEGA’s Grand Prix fruit machine! The man who sent this to us suggested we do a joke about it being “the prequel to Virtua Racing” but that wouldn’t really work, for reasons we’ll outline in the caption.

A prequel is something made AFTER the original, that looks at earlier events. This obviously isn’t a prequel, but could perhaps be described as a precursor. It’s a common mistake people make.

SEEING AS PEOPLE SEND US PHOTOS OF THINGS WHEN WE MENTION THINGS
Has anyone got a hi-res PR photo of nu-indy pop starlet Lily Allen we can have? Only we’ve got a new Employee of the Week ready to go, and want to be all down with the kids and put up a photo of her.

This is the best Google and Myspace has got:

We need something a bit ruder or sexier or at the very least at a better resolution. There’s a good one in Word magazine this month, but we’re not buying that piece of shit.

This is ALMOST too good to be true. We’re not quite convinced it is but that’s beside the point. The point is that this provides a small spark of life and gives us the strength to carry on when we would otherwise sit dwelling on our supposed cynical existence, exhausted by the exertion of wanking with the aid of a hot dog bun.

Thank you SONY. Those lazy summer days of NON-STOP WANKING are not so far off for you now.

Not just a bit better, but MILES better. There’s no possible way we’ll ever top Sonic The Hedgehog Pasta With Tomato And Cheese Sauce. This is the SEGA find of the year, or possibly decade. This is better than finding Sonic’s ACTUAL SHOES!

SONIC CHANNEL – even though it’s SONIC TEAM’s blog – is going on the list of sites we hate, next time we bother changing it. This has probably been on the internet for 13 years, but as far as we’re concerned if it hasn’t been on UKR then it doesn’t count. This new rule means it’s now OK for us to copy things off forums.

F.A.O. ALL THE PEOPLE WHO SEND US STUFF*
You need to BUCK YOUR IDEAS UP. We’re being BEATEN by some stupid JAPANESE BLOG, that probably nobody reads because it’s about SEGA and IN JAPANESE. We want pasta-shaped game character sightings, and we want them YESTERDAY.

*Apart from the man who sent us the pasta link, who is now the inaugural ELITE SEGA SCOUT ALPHA TEAM member, and so awesome we fired up Photoshop and made this especially in his honour:

Only the man who sent us the pasta site link is allowed to download and make copies of this image. Unauthorised downloading and distribution of this logo will lead to us pretending to be you on the internet and causing loads of trouble with who you work for.

It’s all very well that TV commercials have thus far featured women playing Tetris and Animal Crossing and Nintendogs and stuff like that. However, the suggestion (proffered in the New Super Mario Brothers TV commercial) that birds play proper games where you have to not fall off stuff is TOO MUCH.

“Oh my god! There’s a little man in there! How does he breathe? Oh wait, that must be what the holes are for.”

This is the bit where she’s actually shaking the DS up and down and shouting “JUMP! JUMP!” at it. If we’d made this up as a parody, people would have called US sexist.

Silver and gold medals go to A) The face she makes when she sees Mario eat a mushroom and grow big, and B) The face (shown above) she makes when Mario dies respectively, with the latter setting a new world record. “Wow! When I ran into that turtle it played a pretty tune! I wonder if I could get it to do it again?”

Let’s all make 50 Cent: Bulletproof win the Golden Joysticks. That way, the makers will have to go up and accept an award so everyone in the audience can boo and throw wine bottles full of piss at the stage and laugh!

It’s on TV and everything, so this will make everyone stop making gangsta games, and only companies that make sweet games about being happy animals will survive and a New World Order will emerge! (We’ll be THE KINGS of this new world order, of course. We’ll get back to you with a list of weird sex demands once we’re crowned).

Forget all that stuff we’ve said about mobile phone games being shit and irrelevant and for idiots – SONIC IS AT NUMBER ONE IN SOME SORT OF CHART AGAIN!

THE ELSPA UK MOBILE DOWNLOAD CHART, FOR APRIL 2006

1 SONIC THE HEDGEHOG – GLU MOBILE/SEGA
2 TETRIS – EA
3 THE SIMS 2 – EA
4 WORMS – THQ
5 BLOCK BREAKER DELUXE – GAMELOFT
6 ICE AGE 2: ARCTIC SLIDE – GLU MOBILE
7 MONOPOLY – GLU MOBILE
8 EA SPORTS FIFA 06 – EA
9 RONNIE O’SULLIVAN SNOOKER – PLAYER ONE
10 CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER 2006 – EIDOS

This is one of those little victories that makes us happy, like putting a magazine inside a newspaper and only paying for the newspaper.

It’s something for PS3 that the PlayStation creator is calling “Friends” – it’s a “list” of people you play online games with. A sort of “Friends list” if you will.

Where do they get these brilliant ideas from?

This is a sort of review of New Super Mario Bros on DS.

He smells just like we remember!

Look at him! The other kids laughed at us and said he was an unemployed plumber and a bent, but now he’s at the top of his game! He hasn’t even hit mummy once, even though everyone knows she’s been going out with that creepy Mr Gates from the Aldi.

Hold us, daddy. The bank says that when we bought the house from them we actually only bought their permission to live in it, and they’re going to evict us because we asked Joey round for a sleepover. Tell us that you’re going to make it all okay and you’ll never go away again.

As if playing a game about buying carpets and organising flowers into lines wasn’t gay enough, Nintendo is now proud to bring you…

THE ULTIMATE HOMOEROTIC VIDEO GAME PHOTO SHOOT:

So what demographic is Nintendo after with this? The self-harming pretending-to-be-bisexual emo-neo-Goth demographic?

If MySpace had existed in 1991, this would’ve been its official photograph.

This is the caption in which we change our minds and declare the whole thing is actually an amazingly brilliant idea.

We can’t help but wonder who had sex with who after this shoot ended (the ginger man obviously just had a wank on his own).