At Christmas we spoke lightly of Sega’s latest card game, Love and Berry. We said horrible things, like it was obviously the only game that girls would play as you didn’t have to do anything but wear clothes, and there was only ONE BIG BUTTON so they wouldn’t get confused. Obviously this was before we found out that it’s sold 43 MILLION CARDS (at about 50p a throw) in its first year alone. To little girls.

We’ve observed some of these “Little Girls” in their natural environment, and they’re not even talking about the ones with small tits. They mean real little girls. The kind whose hands aren’t even big enough to hold a Game Boy up yet.

Some might say that the time was right for a triumphant return to the hardware market.

This is LEGEND! Not only is it the INCREDIBLY RARE Sega Toys Sega Folding Bicycle, but it’s an ULTRA-RARE RARE AMAZINGLY RARE-RARE model that comes in Japanese Dreamcast orange.

We’re not exaggerating to look cool on the internet — we would spend whatever amount of money it takes to get one of these. Even, say, one thousand pounds. Money would be no object in securing a Dreamcast Orange Folding SEGA Bicycle to put in a cupboard and never risk riding.

TOMORROW:
The worst thing SEGA has ever done. Ever. Even including 32X.

…at least that’s what it looks like. Lots of the Final Fantasy logos have an artsy silhouette behind them; a meteor, a crystal, a Magitek suit, and so forth. What the fuck is this meant to be? Have Square started paying Amano six figure sums to ACTUALLY hurl paint at a piece of paper?

It’s actually funnier when you see it in the shop on a full-sized poster where it’s a couple of inches wide rather than a centimeter. Then it looks like every single person passing it has moaned “OH GOD NOT ANOTHER ONE” and beat their head against it till the blood ran to the floor.

This is embarrassing. Like that whole year we wore women’s jeans without realising. The UK Animal Crossing Wild World TV ad is amazingly female-centric, featuring such exclusively female pursuits as:

LOOKING AT THE LOVELY SKY!

SMILING AIMLESSLY!

HAVING FRIENDS!

BEING IN THE KITCHEN! (good, positive role model for young girls)

GETTING REALLY DRUNK AND GETTING OFF WITH YOUR MATES AND OTHER MEN FROM THE INTERNET EVEN THOUGH SHE SAYS SHE’S STILL A VIRGIN! (not pictured)

BEING HAPPY!

And so on. We’re off to play Halo for a bit until the urge to phone people “just to catch up” wears off.

ELSEWHERE IN ANIMAL CROSSING:

Spong has had an entire AC advertorial makeover that’s pretty damn cool (for an internet advert).

Neo_Kitty has been working on her fish collection.

Like everyone else, we sort of assumed it was going to be a bit shit after playing the first level for five minutes so ignored it.

BUT!

It’s got NiGHTS in it!

It’s got CReAM in it!

It’s got ULaLA in it! Apparently because the game was developed by the part of Sonic Team that used to be United Game Artists (the Space Channel 5 heroes) before they were merged into Sonic Team’s division.

It’s the Sega A-Team! We’d have sex with all three of them and their monkey. Screenshots tomorrow*.

OFFICIAL CHARACTER BIOS HERE, AS IF YOU DIDN’T ALREADY KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THEM:
SONIC RIDERS

*Or in six months, if there isn’t a cheat to unlock everything.

We were planning a fantastic April Fool update where we were going claim that we got a mate at university to put a Gizmondo in a particle accelerator and smash it with so much force that it actually tore the fabric of reality. If we’d done it it would have been fantastic. On the one hand nobody would suspect that we made up something so stupid about something so worthless. On the other hand it would have satirised the miserable efforts at hit-grabbing of other sites to a bloody pulp, to the extent that we’d never have had to put up with another “LOL WE BOUGHT A 360 AND SMASHED IT UP ON CAMERA PLZ CLICK OUR BANNERS” shitfest ever again.

Straight away we hit problems, though. For a start we picked on a Japanese University because almost nobody would be able to check the validity of the story. However, we quickly found out that we don’t speak enough science to know which of our pictures of “KEK” is the genuine article.

We reckon it’s this thing, but we have nothing to base that on but the fact that it looks like the one that you shoot Nemesis with at the end of Resident Evil 3.

Even worse was the fact that we’d need a picture of a Japanese person holding a Gizmondo. People holding Gizmondos, let alone PHOTOS of them are almost non-existent (unless they’re MiniMe or have huge tits). A Japanese person holding one? The plausibility event horizon has been breached.

That’s when we found it. Way back from the mists of May 2005, a story stranger than fiction and a million times more soul-crushing than any tedious internet April Fool photoshop. The story of a Japanese man who was not only holding a Gizmondo… but who loved it so much that he went to THAT SHOP to buy one.

And took photos. And posted about it on his website. Where he KEEPS EMPHASISING THINGS A BIT LIKE WE DO. We’re starting to draw unpleasant parallels.

From what we can tell, he was amazed that not even world famous store Hamleys have the Gizmondo. Only Gizmondo store on same road as Apple store! DO THEY GENUINELY INTEND TO SELL IN THIS MANNER?

Then he takes photos of it next to his other consoles. He says “People say that it looks like the Game Gear but it does not, AND ANYWAY WE LIKE THE GAME GEAR!” Oh God. This could have been us. This is like that episode of Friends where the mad old man downstairs dies and they find out he was exactly the same as Chandler. Oh Jesus.

Here’s a picture of him playing with it on a red London bus, with the Queen and a smiling bobby drinking tea in the background! He walked around London with it all day dangling from his mobile phone strap, and nobody tried to steal it. Awwwwwww. We bet he went back to Japan and told everyone how safe England was.

ASCII 24 – there but for the grace of God (and 250 pounds) go we

Or… it’s creating exciting new revenue streams to drive expansion in fiscal Q4 and grow income from micro-transactions via increased consumer brand recognition and a synergistic marketing mix.

It was more fun when Sega was in charge of everything and didn’t care about making money :(

This is simply more proof that someone needs to give us 50,000 pounds an episode to revolutionise video game television overnight. We will do this by simply BEING OF AN ACCEPTABLE STANDARD instead of utterly, embarrassingly awful.

It’s “Gamerweb 2.0” a name which suggests there was an earlier and even worse version of this rubbish.

YOU… COULD… N’T… MAKE IT… UP.

A sock reviews Crash Bandicoot 3 and gives it 90 percent. When we’re massive television stars (this is inevitable) we’ll be stealing all these great ideas!

We do enough “listening to idiots” on the bus and in the office, we don’t need it all over the internet as well.

THE LINK:
This is the absolutely last time we’re linking to Google Video or YouTube or any of these cocking things, until people get their shit together and start making good ones.

Have you lot got nothing better to do than put “Sega” into search boxes and see what comes up? Yes? Great! Keep them coming. It’s like watching telly with a ten year delay.

SONIC 3 / MICHAEL JACKSON VIDEO INVESTIGATION!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbVM-l2Oku4&search=sonic%20jackson

SEGA MEGADRIVE AND MEGA CD ADS HERE:
Fun with Google video!

“DON’T COPY THAT FLOPPY”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9045861006530293045

TWAT BREAKS XBOX
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7711764065622137607

SATURN SHENMUE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2974855159516349841

“TECH CLOSEUP”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=506187630670416005

SOMETHING ELSE ABOUT SHENMUE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6706024784856398709

SEGA SOCCER RPG
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5321818938998613520&q

Quite old, but you can’t have seen all of them. TOMORROW: Sega Scouts!

Given how inescapable Final Fantasy is, its publicity machine has always been relatively low-key. You can’t see merchandise of Cloud and Zidane and The One That Looks Like Jamie Oliver on the shelves like you can with games such as Pokemon and Dragon Quest. Then, one day, you wake up and Ebay looks like this.

It’s Final Fantasy in a bottle, courtesy of Square and Suntory! This is exactly the kind of stuff we would have spent WHOLE TENNERS on when we were teenagers, despite not having enough money to even heat the flat. Now we can’t escape the certain knowledge that Hironobu Sakaguchi has wanked into EVERY SINGLE BOTTLE.

It really is Final Fantasy in a bottle, too! Here’s how your brain reacts when you drink it.

1) Initial repulsion and horror.

2) The palate begins to settle down. Now you can taste strange, pungent things. The brain struggles for some kind of familiar standpoint from which to judge the experience. Does it taste of aniseed like the sweets you loved as a child, or is it a more mature taste like when you grew up a bit and started to prefer the hard edge of liquorice?

3) As the taste buds finally sort themselves out, you decide that what you’re drinking actually tastes exactly like the time when you tried “Cookery” for yourself and mixed up every bottle in the spice rack with some fairy liquid (because the smell reminded you of dad on a Sunday lunchtime) and ended up really, really sick.

4) Reality comes back into sharp focus and all naive attempts at nostalgia collapse, as you realise that what you have is simply yet another energy drink the same as Red Bull, Red Charge, Red Line and Lucozade XS NRG, only this one has a packet of Jawbreakers dissolved in it. And spunk.

The ingredients are listed as parsley, sage, thyme, royal jelly and something in Japanese that we can’t understand because we don’t know the kanjis for “Company Chairman” and “Tadpoles.” Horrible as it is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the “Collectors Edition” set which comes in these poncey perfume bottles.

Final Fantasy Potion. Un fragrance pour un homme. Un fragrance pour un femme. Un fragrance de l’argent et le wee-wee blanc.