“A week after everyone else I’ve made a hilarious revolution joke” says reader Tom Gaulton. “It’s got sound and everything” he adds, which is quite impressive to us.

Download here [177k]. It’s quite poor, but we haven’t got anything better for today. Or tomorrow. Or [insert day].

Kuja turns into Sephiroth at the end, so we were right and you can all start apologising now for saying we buggered it up. Money would be preferable, but if any of you weigh less than 83 kilos then it would be nice if you could pretend to be our friend at “Industry” events in case the Fragdolls are there and we need to make them jealous.

Advent Children is now available for import on DVD and UMD assuming you have the cash, equipment and inclination. Seems an awful lot of bother just to see buggers jump, though.

Here comes a joke! The joke is we upload a screenshot of a crap PSP game, suggesting it “downgrades” PSP by simply being rubbish. As in, it “downgrades” the perceived value of the console, rather than the operating system.

It’s a topical joke that wouldn’t be out of place on a video game-themed edition of Have I Got News For You? presented, perhaps, by Dominik Diamond and airing exclusively on Bravo very very late at night. We’d be one of those guests you’d think would be funny, but then sits there and never says anything and only features in cut-away shots smiling and nodding when Paul Merton says something good (that we thought of as well and were just about to say, hence the nodding).

We chose Space Invaders “Evolution” to illustrate downgrading a PSP. It is the kind of game you get for free when buying a bargain bundle from Toys R Us or Woolworths, is out in November and has, amazingly, been made into 3D now that technology has progressed enough to properly realise the Space Invaders dream.

…with Nintendogs puppies! This is why people say having a dog is a great way to pull girls — even a bus-faced, rabbit-toothed old Japanese man looks cute when he’s holding a puppy:

It’s OK, he’s been neutered (this happens to all Japanese men by law when they hit 40).

It’s OK, he won’t bite (but he may try to put Mario in you).

CAN WE HAVE ONE. MUM? PLEASE? PLEASE? OH GO ON. PLEASE. WE WON’T LOCK IT IN THE FREEZER LIKE THE LAST ONE.

WE WANT THIS DOG. THIS ACTUAL DOG. NOT ONE LIKE IT, THIS ACTUAL DOG.

Here’s a hi-res photo of that stupid gold PSP, for all you people with blogs who once a week “discover it” and write a tired news story featuring the phrase “bling bling”.

We’re fed-up with seeing the low-res version all over the whole internet, that’s all. This has been a public service update, and is therefore not meant to be funny. Which is JUST AS WELL ISN’T IT?

…as seen in this week’s Megatokyo. You see, this is why we hate “Japan” people. Not because we hate Japan or the Japanese or anime or anything, but because of the whole unshakable conviction that Japan is a magical paradise of video games and cartoons.

Japanese kids just DON’T play video games, and the problem has got so bad that Namco gave it as one of the reasons they’ve merged with Bandai. They own handheld consoles (on which to play Pokemon or Starfi) till the age of seven, because that’s how long it takes for their hands to be big enough to hold a controller. They then get either a Gamecube (for Pokemon Stadium) or a PS2 until they hit tweenage. At this point they either mate with it for life (in the case of boys) or throw it away to pursue a youth filled with boys, mobile phones, selling underwear to old men and trying to turn their skin from yellow to black and their hair from black to yellow (in the case of girls).

The ONLY reason a Japanese teenage girl visits an arcade is:

1) To do “Novelty” stuff like printing stickers of their faces and downloading ringtones from the Konami net terminals.

2) To play adorable games about bursting brightly coloured bubbles

3) To look bored with their boyfriends

4) To watch said boyfriends feed quid after quid after quid into the prize machines in an attempt to impress them, NOT BECAUSE THEY WANT THE PRIZE, but because they want to guage the extent to which he’ll break and humiliate himself for them in order to better assess how easy he’ll be to crush beneath their heel should the relationship turn serious

…EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER ARCADE IN THE WORLD.

Fred Gallagher is a profession real live manga artist!!1 and was once less than ten meters away from a real live Japanese person (although they could have been Chinese or even Korean – they were fat and the lighting was bad and they all sort of look the same).

Some good news and some bad news about Sonic Rush on DS:

Cream’s in it!!! Albeit only in a menu screen capacity, but when just looking at Cream makes you happy a menu screen is all you need. :)

They’re using that 3D tunnel thing for the bonus round AGAIN. :(

Rinko apparently really likes the number 23. You should mention it to her as many times as possible to her if you meet her, it will make her like you more.

COSPLAYING AS SNOW WHITE

……..they’ve sort of lost us with this one, we’ll admit.

HOVERING HOVERING MULTIPLICITOUSLY ABOVE ARCADES

We’re not sure what most of that says because it’s written in ridiculous cutesy Japanese, but we’re told the one in the middle says “EEEEEEEVERYONE BECOOOOOOME HAPPYYYYYYY!”

SHILLING GAMES AND MOBILE PHONES (DUH)

It’s well known that no matter how much you pay a Japanese girl, they just CANNOT smile convincingly about anything. Singing, comics, lesbian porn, they ALWAYS look at the very least just a little bit like they’re scanning for the quickest escape route and calculating how fast they can run in their Ulala platform shoes which they’re being paid to wear.

Pity poor Rinko though. Her job is to sell RETRO SEGA GAMES. This means that in this photo she is DEFINITELY being stared at by a horde of overweight, thirty-ish Sega fans. That’s GENUINE FEAR you can see in her eyes.

TOWERING FOUR FLOORS HIGH OVER DOGENZAKA HILL

Your mission for this week is to see if you can find us an MPG or something of the Princess Rinko TV commercial. We’ve only seen it once and we have no idea what it’s for, but it features ten or so children running round and round, playing air hockey and chanting “SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA SEGA!” in a shrill, high pitched scream while Rinko looks on and says “Piiiiiiii! Puuuuuuun!” (which appears to be her catchphrase).

“Please be gentle, eh? This is Princess Rinko’s part time job. How do you do. This is Princess Rinko. The joys of Sega Ages 2500 are coming to everyone of Earth from the Sega Joy Star. The Sega Joy Star is a shining star where the spirit of everybody’s spirit of enjoyment of games gathers. From now on, I will be supporting Sega Ages 2500!”

So, here’s what you have to buy in order to get to smell the lovely Rinko’s finger.

SPACE HARRIER 2 COMPLETE COLLECTION
Every console version of Space Harrier 2 ever made, emulated down to the last frameskip, even the ones that ran at 3 frames a second and gave you brain cancer. We’d make a nasty comment on that, but we had the Amstrad version of Space Harrier that was in wireframe 3D and we know what suffering really is.

SEGA SYSTEM 16 COLLECTION
Two games on this one. The first is SDI, the lovely little Reaganite trackerball-based shooter refangled for the Playstation mouse. The second is Quartet, everyone’s favourite game that was unspeakably shit but everyone played it because A) It was a Sega game and the lovely, chimey, upbeat music and primary colours got you high and B) It was a one of the only squad based games available in 1986 (and frankly a root canal operation was preferable to playing Gauntlet again).

LAST BRONX
Hooray! The Saturn is back! That’s a good thing! Isn’t it!? Isn’t it? Oh god. Someone tell us what to say.

SEGA MEMORIAL SELECTION
Head On, Tranquiliser Gun, Congo Bongo, Borderline and Doki Doki Penguin Land. Perhaps some kind of sick joke? It’ll be that Sega bullfighting simulator from 1984 next.

GUNSTAR HEROES!
Gunstar Heroes!

ADVANCED WORLD WAR
Gunstar Heroes!

GALAXY FORCE 2
Neat old shooter using the Space Harrier / Afterburner engine. Nothing spiteful or cynical to say about this; after all, Gunstar Heroes!

PANZER DRAGOON
We’ve seen a trailer of this we downloaded off the internet, and it looked as horrible as the Saturn original. We saw it running at TGS, and it looked the same. Perhaps it’s a cruel punishment that Sega has been instructed to inflict on the Japanese for only buying fourteen X Boxes. *CHECKS FAMITSU* Oh, wait. Thirteen. One of them broke.

DYNAMITE DEKA
The best thing about Dynamite Deka (aka Die Hard Arcade) is that it got slammed by the mainstream press on incisive and well thought-out grounds such a “WHAT THE HELL? THIS GAME HAS INFINITE CONTINUES! I FINISHED IT ON MY FIRST TRY!” As such, every single well-played game of DD that you perpetrate is a direct smack in the teeth to EVERY ONE OF THE TRAITORS WHO MURDERED SEGA. With a big plank. With splinters in it. That’s been on the floor and everything.

We love standing up for the little man! Actually, we prefer standing next to the little man so we look tall and manly in comparison (if you’re a little man and would like to hang out with us at a selection of fashionable London bars, please get in touch. We can probably be friends).

BUT ANYWAY
Someone’s complained about the Pek Ham reference on the site, wherein a reader said it was “a substandard SPAM substitute from Poland”. Apparently it’s of a superior quality to SPAM in the eyes of some!

THE FULL COMPLAINT IN FULL:

Hello

I would just like to pull you up about your article on Pek Ham:

Pek Ham is also a substandard SPAM substitute from Poland that you can buy from ALDI, LIDL, or any other questionable quality food stores.

My chinese friend buys it. You do not want to know what ‘in natural juices’ means, or how much actual pork is in it.

Well I used to work for Ridpath Pek before it was taken over by Animex and made into Smithfield Foods. Pek Ham is not only sold to “questionable food stores” it is also sold to Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Waitrose, Morrisons as well as many small independent food stores and shops.

As for being substandard well that is your opinion. We often received many compliments about our product telling us it was preferred over Spam, although most of these comments came from the North of England. We didn’t get as many compliments from the south for some reason only complaints about supplied staining, go figure. Also Pek Ham does not just come from Poland, it is also made in Ireland although the Irish product it not as nice as the import from Poland. I do not usually eat tinned meats as a rule but during my time at Pek I also acted as quality assurance and so got to do taste testing and I have found that I prefer Pek Ham to Spam.

“Natural Juices”… um… I never saw that on the label, it must have been changed since I left so I can’t comment on that one. However I can tell you that Pek Ham or Pek Chopped Pork to give it its proper name is made from 100 percent pork. Pek Gold is actually one of the healthiest canned meats that you can purchase as it is 100 percent pork with less then 3 percent fat.

So there you go, that’s you told.

Tanith

PS: Please don’t take this seriously; I just feel the need to enlighten everybody into the joys of Pek. I don’t know why though. I should hate them. I had a great job at Pek, good money, great people and then Smithfield came along and said they would make me redundant unless I moved to Norwich. So it was bye-bye cushy Job, hello horrible real world. Still at least I had almost 4 months to concentrate on my games collection while I lived of my redundancy money.

Readers! Has anyone threatened to make YOU redundant unless you move to Norwich? If so, please get in touch. We can’t be friends with you, but may be able to forward your details onto someone that can.