Certain “industry” people often suggest pirated games can damage your games console and can contain secret hidden porn that’ll turn your children into sex monsters.

This is a lie! A UKR spokesman (us) said (here and now) “most pirated games do work, usually are the full thing and a copied game has NEVER damaged any games machine we’ve ever owned”. We then went on to add “We’ve never found any secret porn *SAD SMILEY FACE* and it’s all just a big lie to scare parents into paying 50 quid for games in the run-up to Christmas”.

These sick lies about piracy MUST STOP.

THE TRUTH ABOUT PIRACY:

Not pirating games is COSTING YOU MONEY.

Pirated games usually do work.

You don’t fund terrorism by downloading games yourself through, say, Bittorrent, via, say, Torrentspy.com, then burning them to DVD with, say, DVD Decrypter set in, say, Write Mode.

At worst piracy only funds the bloke you bought it off, who will spend the money on a new graphics card or more blank DVDs.

If pirated games are rubbish, it doesn’t really matter!

The reason non-pirated games are so expensive is because everyone’s a GREEDY CAPITALIST PIG who wants a better car – and YOU’RE PAYING FOR IT.

Widespread piracy among the poor means they have more money to spend on alcohol and cigarettes, shaving up to 10 years from their life expectancy — saving the taxpayer money in the long run.

Buying pirate games from market stalls helps keep Britain’s dying markets alive, helping us hold on to our national identity in these ever changing times.

If piracy is so bad, how come companies are allowed to make DVD writers and sell blank DVDs?

Making the 50 Cent game available for free will greatly affect its profitability, thus making the prospect of a sequel less likely.

Downloading games yourself funds things like paying your Council Tax, which is a good thing!

The only victims of piracy are shops that think it’s OK to charge 50 quid for a new game (Tesco, Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360).

If you have any more “good things about piracy” please post them in the Comments bit (you have to be registered to post, which is a vain attempt to stop people posting porn, gay porn, Nazi porn and gay Nazi porn at the bottom of every article).

Hello to UK:R special friend Heather Kelley, level designer for Ubisoft and winner of a recent contest to design a sex game. Heather walked away with the title by challenging the idea that a sex game had to be about intercourse. This she did by designing a DS game where the player pets a little blue bunny in order to learn how to masturbate.

The aim of the game is to poke, caress and stroke Lapis The Bunny and observe its reactions until it reaches a state of “Perfect Lappiness.” Or, as we like to say, to “Cream The Rabbit.”

Blue skies: check. Rabbits and rainbows and happiness: check. Wanking: check. Never before has a game reminded us of our childhoods in such a completely creepy way! By the way, we swear we didn’t make this up. You can read Heather’s presentation and experience a playable demo here, but you might find the pictures of Tamagotchis, Nintendogs, monkey’s arses, Harry Potter and the Cat Bus a bit disturbing. What the hell, though! Ubisoft, publish this game and make this woman a Frag Doll!

BONUS MATERIAL: The only thing better than a story like this is when a real journalist gets hold of it and thinks it’s a real game. (Needless spoiler: it’s a woman.)

Nothing will ever beat this one, but this one here for new PSP boxing game ‘Boxer’s Road 4’ comes quite close.

There’s something so endearing about company heads being forced to join in with promotional activities and photography. He’s getting into it, though. You can tell by the look in his eyes. He really believes he can take those bitches out!

Have that, EA! Sega’s Condemned: Criminal Origins managed to outsell EVERY Electronic Arts Xbox 360 game when the console launched in the UK last Friday, which MAKES US HAPPY like our medicine from the doctor combined with coffee and alcohol.

Although Condemned isn’t really a Sega game in that you’re a policeman who hits men with pipes and collects evidence in the dark, not an animal that collects yellow things in a sunny field. Still it’s a good start!

NEXT-GENERATION SCORE SO FAR:
Sega 1 (Condemned, week 1) – Electronic Arts 0

…which is presumably why they scored it lower than the original, despite it being BETTER BY MILES.

You’re not just limited to drawing patterns on clothes and stuff any more, you know! Now you can cover the whole village in your textures. You can chop down the trees, install a football pitch and put all the animals in the strips of your favourite team. OR! Make brightly coloured chequered textures, and make the whole place look like a level from Sonic The Hedgehog.

Imagine that! Your own personal Green Hill Zone, populated by flickies who live there and want to be your friend and give your presents. And it’s snowing. It started snowing yesterday because it’s Christmas. Christmas in happy pretend land.

And all that’s BEFORE you’ve even connected it to the internet to find people to come and visit your village and be your friend! Then you can go to the new all-night piano bar and drink loads of coffee and stay up REALLY LATE. It’s cheered us up so much that we actually bumped into two people on the way to work today because we were looking at the sky and cheerfully muttering and humming to ourselves.

Animal Crossing Wild World — It’s going-back-to-work-after-lunchtime-completely-sober-TASTIC!

It’s called Disco Dream. The idea is you just give your money STRAIGHT TO SEGA by putting it in a slot. This saves Sega money on R&D and marketing, plus you still get that Sega arcade thrill of putting money in a slot and then seeing some bright lights go off in time to music!

Meet you all at the Trocadero tonight then. The campaign for an Xbox 360 version starts NOW. Who wants to be in charge of the internet petition?

SEGA’S REASON FOR MAKING THIS KIND OF THING:
“Sega’s promise of diversifying its product range a year or so ago will be evident at this year’s (ATEI 2006) show. Its venture into the pusher market was tested at the Preview last year when it showed its ‘all singing all dancing’ six-player Disco Dream. Then it was shown to gain operator reaction and feedback. The result is a product that has been modified to suit European legalities and operator requests. The game features a massive glitter ball ‘Cash Splash’ feature, dancing Divas and a multitude of plasma screens and features.”

ADDITIONAL NOTES ABOUT DISCO DREAM:

10p slots easily switched to 2p slots for deployment in poor Northern towns.

Uses a modified SUPERSLOT MIKANU MAX-YEN board with two additional on-board coin slots.

Just after midnight on the second of December Microsoft set off a sort of big indoor firework, played the Xbox 360 “Jump In” advert and got a DJ to play “Jump” by Van Halen. We’re not commenting on that, not even ironically or satirically, just reporting the bare bones facts of what happened.

Here are the only photos we took that came out OK:

The room was big and dark with men in it.

Then it got lighter. Someone’s excited!

Then as has become sadly customary, we got lost going home.

These bottom two are the main road we walked home down after falling asleep on the bus and getting lost in Woolwich. Proportionally speaking, the main road bit was the biggest part of the night and the least fun.

We hope your game sells a million copies, or three million copies, or five million copies, or however many millions of copies it needs to sell to be considered a massive global success.

And thanks for “helping out” with the Dreamcast. Beat you later, losers!

Then all the outsourced Mexican testers can have a merry Christmas and no one gets killed or sued!

JUST TO RECAP:

Don’t kill anyone, ever.

Don’t even try to shit people up by saying you’ve got a knife.

And we’re not ones to turn down fully-formed, VERY BITTER updates that only require the pressing of CONTROL+A, CONTROL+V then PUBLISH BLOG* to get on the internet.

How to get ahead in games development…
By “Ensign Huey”

Here are some tips on how to succeed in the games industry (after all you’re special).

1. Ignore any advice given by gamers, despite their intuitive insight built upon several decades of actually playing games, your coke addled mind is “thinking outside the box” and doesn’t need any extra help.

2. Have lengthy discussions about games review scores but always make sure that you score lower than your peers to get that critical edge (you also need to pout as you deliver your “definitive” score).

3. Dismiss frame rate problems out of hand because you’ve read in Heat that “nobody notices anyway”.

4. When you invariably lose on your game during a huge press event, don’t admit that you did testing on it. As rule, don’t acknowledge games testing exists at all.

5. If you’re a girl you can sleep your way to the top. Gaming needs more people that look pretty and there’s nothing worse than having to work with someone who does their job properly.
NB: Be selective on your conquests; the last thing you want is one of the muppets blabbing about what a lousy shag you were to a reporter.

6. As shit hits the fan about a bug or a series of bugs that the testers that don’t exist found but you ignored and then swathes of the gaming public encountered anyway, hide in the toilet and fill your nose with charlie. If it’s an online bug; shrug and carry on nonchalantly thumbing through whatever (anybody who’s important doesn’t plays online anyway).

7. Don’t hire anyone that knows more about games and/or has more talent than you, if you did it would only take people’s attention away from your spiky and badly dyed blonde hair.

8. Treat artists and programmers like shit. They only make the games and are thus utterly expendable.

9. Belittle new game ideas put forward by your team. The public don’t want fresh new games with a tangible sense of fun; they want the same banal and mediocre gaming fecal matter already available everywhere.

Remember, as long as you’re alright that’s all that matters. People will forget about GoldenEye Rogue Agent and the Eye Powers and the fact that you said it would be better than Halo 2. After all, if you weren’t in the games industry you’d be the failure that everyone said you’d be. You showed them, oh yes.

*Actually we had to save it as raw text so the apostrophes came out OK, insert some “blockquotes” and spellcheck it. Which took about five minutes.