Good god, it’s only the bloody Flag Man doing the umpiring in the OutRun level. Words. Not. Enough. Joy. Throbbing. Through. Veins.

The only thing better than this would be if they put Tim Henman in it to ironically represent Virtua Tennis.

Need to go and have a lie down.

Best SEGA intro movie since Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, too. Not that that’s a particularly good omen.

There’s an OutRun stage in Superstars Tennis as well. And that’s Sonic standing in it. Sonic is in OutRun. At the far end is Ulala. Ulala is in OutRun. It’s all too much to take in. We are going to wear out the exclamation mark button when we eventually do a review of this.

It’s either going to be the world’s best game ever by at least a 50% margin, or like mixing your dinner and pudding together and expecting it to taste twice as nice.

As expected, the post-Christmas “Let’s be REALLY awesome in 2008 and put LOADS of effort into EVERYTHING!” enthusiasm is already a distant memory. Here’s what we slogged through and got away with during the last seven days for various other media nodes.

This thing about the Halo movie which isn’t really very good, but we did come up with a nice idea of an ending for the film.

This thing where we “liveblogged” from PC World. It was a joke about all the people that “liveblogged” from the previous day’s MacWorld. It was a fun afternoon, even though we had to shower with bleach to get the smell of death (PC World) off afterwards.

This thing about Star Wars shoes. There really wasn’t anything better to write about on the entire internet that afternoon.

This thing which is just the same old anti-Mac thing we’ve been banging on about for years, only done with less swearing for the mainstream. There’s a photo on it too, if you want to put my head on some gay porn for the amusement of the internet.

This thing about that man in his pants who says he “did” the Wii way before Nintendo.

This thing about LG’s “fresh meat,” because you can’t not use pictures like this when they come along:

It’s January. It’s cold. It’s raining. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about anything. 4/10 and an apology.

Complete transcript of event/conversation and a variety of photographs included as proof.

This was at Video Games Live ages ago. Richard played the piano. We took photos, but were sitting/hiding right at the back and they came out very poorly. Hence the lack of an update at the time.

The photos were supplied at 3488 x 2616 resolution. But they were not particularly flattering to either man at that size, so good old 500 wide it is.

This is nearly the same picture, only less blurry. History demands that even the blurry photos of Richard and the ones with his eyes closed are used and saved for future generations, he is that important to modern culture. You wouldn’t go binning a photo of you and Neil Tennant just because it came out a bit blurry or he had his eyes closed, would you?

HOW THE MEETING UNFOLDED
“So there I was at Video Game Live. Intermission. Piss, wash hands, look up and right in front of me… RICHARD JACQUES!”

Grab wife, all possesions and camera. Walk up and say “Richard, do you mind having a picture taken with me?”

RJ: “Not at all”

RJ puts arm round me… and I him…

Wife takes first photo…

Blurred…

So I chat for a sec and mention how you guys love him.

RJ: “I know… you’re not one of their spies are you?”

Me: “No… (thinking ‘not yet’)”

RJ: “Will probably see this on there tomorrow with something bad, huh?”

Me: “Are you kidding only nice things about you at UK:R…”

RJ: “Good”

“Man I swear he was like soooooo laid back. It made my night to stand near him and shake his hand. And god he can’t half play piano – Paul”

Before she lucked upon that gimmicky thing of repeating the last syllable of a word about six times and became famous, poor Rihanna had to work the promotional circuit just like any other wannabe.

This included the ultimate shame of having to play Xbox Live Arcade games against the likes of us, while smiling as if she (a) knows what’s happening and (b) is having fun and would be doing this anyway if she was just at home on her own and using her personal Gamertag.

And she wore a headset. We didn’t know they fitted the heads of girls. It must’ve been specially made.

“Bruises on knees, always keen to please.”

Here’s one where you can see her shoes. We understand the importance many place upon this aspect of female celebrities.

Here’s a German advert for SEGA’s Wii version of Ghost Squad. They are cleverly referencing a Sony product. It might be ironic. It might be really slagging Sony off. It might just be a joke now that Sony and SEGA are friends. Can’t really tell as it’s all in German.

If you’re really bored today, you could do worse than read this ace old article written by Stewart Lee about the German sense of humour. It will make you understand and like Germans. Seriously.

Guitar Hero’s getting churned out at such an astonishing rate these days it’s hard to be even remotely excited about it – especially when the core gameplay is worse than it was when the game was called “Frequency” and came out in 2001, and you could play it sitting down without having to be ironic about it or pretending to like The Killers.

Anyway, here’s a photo of a woman demonstrating a Guitar Hero clone/tie-in called an “Air Rocker”. It’s just gone up on Games Press and is probably the sort of thing you lot will be interested in:

Her name is Twee Nguyen. This doesn’t count as us stalking her because this image has been released by the PR company and her name tag is clearly visible. No way is this threatening behaviour. And besides, she almost certainly lives in America so is too far away to worry about finding, or for her to worry about getting found.

Here’s one of her in an alternate costume (bottom-left). This photo was probably taken on a different day. Perhaps those are here “normal” clothes she usually wears? A brief four-hour session of Googling her brought up this, a video of her dancing and several “false positives” on social networking sites. See what you can find!

A beautiful piece of work. It would be at home on the wall of any fine art collector, particularly a 33-year-old fine art collector who lives on his own in a one bedroom flat and still has his Mega Drive connected to the the TV via the superior RGB SCART connection and the Saturn on S-video.

SONIC DESKTOP #6: “I’VE GOT YOUR BACK, SONIC!”

Stunning, despite once again being supplied in magazine-friendly ‘portrait’ orientation. Sadly this image brings back many painful memories of Tails dropping all the rings at the most inopportune moments, so is quite hard for us to look at without getting angry.

And as has become traditional, someone took the last one and made it a bit better. A man/boy/youth called Matthew made it a bit wider to maybe go on your screen better. Sadly he didn’t go the whole widescreen hog, but it’s better than the original.

PREVIOUSLY, ON GREATEST SONIC DESKTOPS:

“UNDERWATER CRISIS!“

“SAFE LANDING FROM ROBO CHAOS ZONE!“

“I’M COMING TO GET YA!“

“MUST… KILL… SONIC THE HEDGEHOG!“

“YOU CAN’T STOP ME THIS TIME, SONIC!“

We like the swimmers. Very good. Very lifelike. We also like the water effects. They are very nice and technically superb. It must’ve taken a lot of time to develop such a realistic water simulation. It really can’t be faulted, even this early in development.

But can you put women pole vaulters in it, please?

This one will do. She’s got that slightly manly edge we like. It’ll make doing jokes about it next year so much easier for everyone on the internet if the women’s pole vault is represented. The game won’t be out for ages, so there’s enough time to get them in. And think of the fun you’ll all have doing the motion-capture.

We arrived back on the “blogging scene” after Christmas with all the enthusiasm of a taxi driver offered half what he wants to go 30 miles in the opposite direction to where he lives at 3.35am. Here are some dregs we scraped up and reformed into updates for some other sites over the last seven days:

This thing which we wasted way too many man-hours doing, seeing as it’s just a boring story about some rubbish old Britney Spears videos going up on Xbox Live that no one’s ever going to read.

This thing about having to poo in the garden if the Sun explodes.

This thing about using new Sony Memory Sticks to hold copies of PSP games, because acknowledging the existence of the rampant PSP piracy scene on an “above the line” technology site seems DANGEROUS and EXCITING to us and will probably piss Sony off no end. Which, at the end of the day, is what it’s all about.

This thing about a pod smokers can stand in to not get wet.

This thing about Americans buying Radiohead CDs even though they could’ve just had it off the internet for free ages ago.

This thing about some headphones, because you can’t not use pictures like this when they come along:

All killer, no filler. That’s the motto going forward into Q1. 8/10. Next week it’ll be back to the normal level of mediocrity.