Bring on the spurned! Now that Gizmondo has been revealed as the senior management cash-hoovering disgrace that it was always clearly designed to be, the poor, disgruntled staff are breaking cover with their tales.

Our first Gizmondo employee to speak – hopefully the first of many – is anonymous anonymous person ‘Mr Anonymous’ (not his real name).

These words were typed in by an actor.

Hi! I was working in QA at Gizmondo for 8 months before getting offered a new job 3 days before they fired us all :)

I dunno if this will be of any interest to you but you might be amused to hear that I got paid late on about 5 of those months because they just didn’t have the money to pay us (apart from that one time their bank manager made a mistake and they showed us all a copy of the letter from the bank manager so we would actually believe them). So for about a week every month or so, the Gizmondo QA department among others would refuse to do any work until we got paid. Some of us had to borrow money from petty cash just to afford to make it into work on several occasions.

When I joined it was a whole development studio (used to be Warthog) and they had some cool sounding games in production which probably would have been the best games on there, but obviously when they realised no money was coming in after the launch they thought making good games was going to be too expensive and ‘downsized’ by firing their developers leaving just a rather demoralised QA department.

Other than that, we all had a hilarious time hearing about the CEO paying his wife for marketing consultancy and paying us out of his own pocket when funds were low. Especially when we then later read headlines like “Former Gizmondo executive’s mafia convictions revealed”! Of course any news we heard about the company’s finances ended up on the internet long before we were told anything.

As for the games, I think the only game I really enjoyed playing was SSX which is probably better on every other platform anyway. It’s a shame they never got chance to release the augmented reality games using the camera cause they were ace. Or you know… finishing their flagship game Colours might have helped their sales a bit. Everyone likes GTA clones!

Also please say hi to all the great people from Gizmondo QA who all read this site religiously!

Keep me anonymous please, I’m not sure what I can still be sued for…

Thanks, Mr Anonymous (not his real name)! Did YOU work for Gizmondo? If so, please get in touch. We’d particularly like to hear from the following:

Anyone who used to work in the shop, particularly the people who said they remember the day we came in to take our photos and are apparently blaming UKR for killing the console.

Anyone who used to post on the official Gizmondo forum – to this day we remain convinced you were all paid employees embarking upon rudimentary “viral marketing”.

Anyone else who got bummed by the Gizmondo scam. Bulletproof anonymity assured.

These are our top five improvised DS touchpens rated on functional use, preparation needed and cost to replace.

5 – HOUSE KEY

PREPARATION: None
USE: Pretty duff really. Too small to see what you’re doing, and scratches the screen up something rotten. You can file the sharp bits off using the edge of the kerb. but then you can’t get back in your house any more.
COST TO REPLACE: All your dignity when you have to call the landlord at chucking out time because you got shitfaced and left the key in the pub instead, plus the locksmith’s callout charge and expenses.

4 – TOOTHPICK

PREPARATION: Cleaning the scotch egg off it so people don’t think you’re scum
USE: Average. Hurts your hand after a while because it’s too thin, then you drop it and can’t pick it up because people would think you were REALLY odd if you picked up a lost toothpick.
COST TO REPLACE: Practically none.

3 – THE FRAME OF AN AIRFIX MODEL BROKEN UP A BIT

PREPARATION: You have to wiggle it a lot to break a stylus-sized bit off it, then chew the end a bit to get the sharp bits off which ends up with you getting a mouthful of plastic.
USE: Very good. Light, small, customisable and enjoyable. Sadly lots of fun to play with too, though, so you’ll probably absentmindedly snap it in half the next time Fifty Cent comes on your television.
COST TO REPLACE: Variable.

2 – AN ACTUAL PEN

PREPARATION: None
USE: Depends on the pen. With the biro bit clicked in, it’s perfectly functional for most games like Animal Crossing and Resident Evil which run on menus. For games that require more, precise touchpen control can be achieved by using the actual nib of the ballpen. This, however, leaves annoying but removable stains (much like most of the things we enjoy doing).
COST TO REPLACE: Only the discomfort of having to explain where all the office biros have gone.

1 – HALF A DISPOSABLE CHOPSTICK

PREPARATION: A minute or so spent chewing it down to a point, and getting some SERIOUSLY worried looks on the train
USE: Shockingly, amazingly perfect. Not only is it practically weightless and easy to wield, but the soft wood makes it comfortable and satisfying to hold and use and equals absolutely minimal wear on your DS screen. Furthermore, carrying a chewed and jagged spike of wood around makes you look scary and mental so nobody will laugh at you for playing Nintendogs.
COST TO REPLACE: A few pence if you buy a big pack of them.

VERDICT: A surprise victory for Asian cutlery! Chopsticks – they’re not just for jamming viciously into your eye to take the pain of Xbox 360 away any more!

It’s the Hip-Hop Gaming League! The HHGL has even got Snoop Dogg involved, getting him to quite awkwardly read out some scripted lumps of dialogue about “playas” and “mo playas” coming together on Xbox Live.

You should check out the movie, it makes this look good.

This is the HHGL’s fictional representation of the video games media. This is quite possibly the most wrong thing we’ve ever seen. For a start, there’s girls there and no one is morbidly obese and avoiding eye contact by staring at their notepads.

E3 isn’t really like this at all. In fact, you could describe it as the “polar opposite”.

Is she the new staff writer on teamxbox.com, or a hired actress?

If we were being cynical, we might suggest it’s all just a marketing circle-wank organised by companies with too much money to spend on targeting imaginary demographics.

Next week is “Sprite Draft Week”.

The entire video disaster can be seen here. We sort of stole this link from Spong, but only because they said we should “do something on it”.

We’ve got this thing running, which is a “wiki” you can edit with all your sightings of Sony’s AMAZING and BARE-FACED LIES about PlayStation3. Like, for example, the one from just today about it coming out in “Spring 2006” which, roughly speaking, is between four and 12 weeks away. It beggars belief, it really does, so let’s keep a record of it all for future generations.

Simply go here and add any PS3 lies you’ve spotted Sony making in public, remembering to add some sort of “source” link for future reference.

Hopefully some of you are clever developers that can fill us in on the complicated lies to do with “memory” and “processors” and things. We’ll look after the release date.

It’s a bit of a rubbish-looking page, but that’s because we don’t understand how wikis work and had to get someone else to make a free one on our behalf.

IN OTHER HOUSE-KEEPING NEWS:

THIS is a link to our MySpace thing, featuring fictional example friend “Tom”. Watch it stagnate and eventually expire.

THIS is an Animal Crossing Wild World forum someone else set up. Watch it stagnate and eventually expire.

Permanent links to these have been added somewhere down to the right in that messy bit no one bothers looking at.

Let’s have a look at the mood-swingometer for an accurate reading.

SONIC RUSH = PLUS 100 POINTS!

ANIMAL CROSSING = PLUS 100 POINTS!

SUDDEN TREND FOR SUPERHEROES THAT GET THEIR POWERS FROM MOBILE PHONES = SCRUB EVERY INCH OF THE ENTIRE COUNTRY WITH BLEACH AND FIRE

…and if this shit spreads past the Pacific rim, we’re talking orbital bombardment.

We got it this morning and haven’t been able to stop playing it:

It’s has that “just one more go” addictive feeling! 10/10.

The ideal Valentine gift from yourself, to yourself. Stay tuned for exclusive hands-on video and pics.

Let’s address some obvious male workplace issues by pretending they’re really deep and important and having a conference!

If anyone would like to sponsor one of these conferences, please get in touch. We’re ideally looking to spend at least five days in a nice hotel somewhere in America.

MEN IN HAIRDRESSING CONFERENCE
Men are MASSIVELY UNDER-REPRESENTED in the hairdressing industry. This is SHAMEFUL DISCRIMINATION! We must immediately discuss ways of making more men into hairdressers. For this conference we’ll spend four days in a nice hotel in San Francisco or Los Angeles, hedging around the really obvious fact that most men JUST DON’T LIKE being hairdressers.

MEN IN DEPILATION CONFERENCE
It’s a DISGRACE that the UK hair-removal industry isn’t composed of a 50:50 ratio between male and female workers. This five-day conference in New York or Washington DC will address ways more men can be FORCED AGAINST THEIR WILL into doing jobs they don’t particularly like just so that it looks more balanced.

MALE DINNERLADIES CONFERENCE
Why aren’t there more male dinnerladies? Is it because the men don’t like cooking and wearing hair nets much? It can’t be that simple! So let’s get lots of people to give talks about other reasons they’ve just thought up, for about five days in a nice hotel in Vancouver.

THE ‘WHY DON’T WOMEN LIKE PORN?’ CONFERENCE
Approximately 90 percent of porn viewers are male. This is UNBALANCED and discriminatory. At this conference we’ll force women to watch porn until they bloody well start liking it as much as we do. We plan on holding this conference in Paris, so we can use French porn. French girls are hairy, but thin and cute in the face.

You haven’t lived or DIED HORRIBLY BY GETTING TRAPPED IN A BURNING CAR WRECK until you’ve watched “GameLife Video Game Review Show Episode 1” by Andrew Rosenblum Productions.

Featuring Andrew Rosenblum, who you might recognise from such productions as “Me Filming Myself Wanking” and “Mum’s cat”.

It’s all shot in grainy close-up, like porn.

REALLY HORRIBLY BAD PORN THAT WILL STOP YOU THINKING ABOUT SEX AND EVEN WANKING FOR EVER.

SEE IT HERE:
GameLife Video Game Review Show Episode 1

Download all the stuff you used to watch as a child, and stop yourself from mourning one more element of your youth as you are faced with the stark choice of choosing between:

A) The DVD boxed set special edition of A Sequence of Unfortunate Events with added scenes and commentaries, or

B) An agonisingly slow BBC production in which a team of impossibly curly-haired child actors are aghast at being sent to live in a sleepy seaside town with their Great Uncle Portmeirion, but become involved in a magical adventure which involves being chased around a school playing field by an old man with a long nose called WitchPrick.

Occasionally there would be a puppet.