Remember Trip Hawkins? Probably not. Anyway, his company Digital Chocolate has had another trademark AMAZING IDEA. His idea is as follows:

New mobile game develops your brain

Digital Chocolate’s Brain JuiceTM game lets phone users train their mental muscles anywhere

Sydney, Australia, October 17, 2006 – Digital Chocolate, Inc., a leading publisher of high-quality, original (HA HA HA!) software for mobile phones has today announced the launch of its latest mobile game, Brain JuiceTM. The game, which has been designed to exercise the brain, is the first in a series of Brain JuiceTM games to be published throughout the last quarter of 2006.

Brain JuiceTM can be played on any mobile handset and provides brainteasers and puzzles from three categories: mathematic, visual, and memory, offering different challenges to the brain. The problems are suitable for all ages, with the difficulty level changing according to the user’s progress. For best results, a daily dosage of Brain JuiceTM is recommended.

Head of Digital Chocolate’s operations in Europe, Managing Director Mr. Ilkka Paananen commented: “The Brain JuiceTM mobile game joins in the growing trend of health-related consumer products. It simply makes mental exercise more enjoyable.” Mr. Paananen also hopes to influence the general perception of mobile games. “Games offer relaxation, stimulation and fun, and this is undoubtedly beneficial for all dwellers of stressed urban environments. We believe Brain Juice will cause a minor revolution in mobile gaming, bringing us more gamers from new user groups, such as academic professionals, women, and baby boomers.”

The game tracks the players’ progress over time and shows it in the form of a graph, making brain power comparison great fun for the whole family or a group of friends. By excelling at the micro-games inside the game, one can unlock more levels and more micro-games. For additional variation, brain development enthusiasts can order new sets of micro-games monthly. The game can be downloaded via the WAP portal of all major operators and content providers. Brain JuiceTM is available from 3 Mobile from their Planet 3 Content Portal, Vodafone Australia, Vodafone New Zealand, Telstra, Optus, Virgin Mobile Australia and Telecom New Zealand.

Mobile phone gaming. Shocking. To the core.

Years ago, there was a mad bloke who used to go round Southend-on-Sea with a big marker pen writing CANCELLED on all the posters advertising forthcoming gigs. His dedication was legendary. No promoter could escape his midnight scribblings. We thought of him when we heard today’s news and made this in his honour.

Tomorrow: Gran Turismo PSP CANCELLED! Probably.

Call us crazy radicalists, but if we were asked to make a flash game about Sonic for the internet we like to think we could come up with something a little bit more innovative than the world’s 1,500,475th tedious Breakout clone.

This is clearly symptomatic of the general malaise surrounding the Sonic franchise.

At least it makes the ring sound when you press something. 6/10.

Innovative interactive features! Although when we sent ourselves a postcard we just got a broken image. This, once again, is clearly symptomatic of the general malaise surrounding the Sonic franchise.

It was made by one man. SEGA should give the contract to make the next Xbox 360 game to Michael Dobbins. Can’t be any worse and he’s bound to be cheaper. If you are Michael Dobbins, please can you email us. We would like to interview you.

THIS LINK TO THE FLASH GAME MIGHT WORK:
Sonic Chaos Crush (Breakout).

Overly black emo goth blog Insert Credit managed to beat us in getting a clip of Wii being reviewed on Newsnight’s snobbish-but-fun arts Review section. It was good.

It featured arty grown-ups being all coy about actually enjoying playing games, mainly because Wii makes them so easy to play even posh MILFs can manage to work out what’s going on. PS3 didn’t go down so well and was only mentioned in passing. The tide has turned.

Wii DISCUSSED BY BOFFINS ON NEWSNIGHT:
YouTube – BBC Newsnight talks about Wii and PS3

And we thought this was a VERY BAD IDEA, until we read to the bit about it only being plastic poo. That’s probably OK and not against any laws. Especially in Spain. Good on you, crazy Europeans. Here’s how it works:

Sponsor a Poo and send it (with a personal note) to Sony
By El Alcalde de Tomelloso and Cubitorah

Are we men or mice?

Are you tired of abuse?

Gamerah is, and we have decided to do something about it. We are going to show Sony that in Europe there is no humiliation without response. We are going to show them that we are not an unimportant third-rate market. A pound of flesh.

Delays, higher prices, sloppy translations, harassment of import stores, and, even worse, cheekiness. What does Gamerah say to all this? Gamerah says: NO! And the way we propose to let the evildoers at Sony know is very simple: by sponsoring plastic poos which we will send to Sony’s higher echelons in Spain in one or many boxes.

Imagine: you are angry with Sony since the delay, or since they cancelled your order at play-asia, or even since the death of Dreamcast, like some resentful Sega fans in our staff. Anyway: your patience has run out. What can you do? Very simple.

1. Send us an email to apadrinaunacaca@gamerah.com. Include your nickname and your comment/complaint to Sony (one line). Just one grievance per poo, although you can send as many poos as you like.

2. We will reply to you with a bank account number and an identification number.

3. Transfer 4 euro and include the identification number on the transfer’s subject. This way we will know it is you.

4. We will attach your message to one of the fake excrements and put it, along with your nickname, in the box we will send to Sony’s Spanish headquarters. Of course, we will also include a petition asking them to forward the poos to their bosses in Japan.

Some examples of what you might write:

Tonio87: For the HDMi cable.
Pacotazo: For killing Lik-Sang.
Pepoto: For having no typographical criteria.

Here is an example of what they will look like. Imagine Phil Harrison’s face! Hohoho!

The rubber band is provisional.

Just remember: no direct insults or death threats. Be subtle, as in our examples. We know you can do it.

THANKS, SPANISH JURY
Gamerah are the people who made the fake Horoshi Yamauchi interview a while back, so they’ll probably go through with it as well.

Specifically the photographs of mountains Sony keeps sending out to illustrate Gran Turismo “HD”.

That’s definitely just a photograph of a mountain. It’s not really impressive that PS3 can display photographs. You can get 1080p photographs off Google, and most phones can display photographs these days.

Philips CDi could display photographs as backgrounds. So could the MEGA CD. This is not clever.

You can see the join.

Sony certainly faces its own ‘Everest’ in making people believe any of the shit it churns out these days.

IN NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE:
Sony expects us to be impressed by Singstar’s ability to play back music.

This is instead of a review. You really don’t want to read a review and we don’t want to have to write it or be the ones to break it to you. Writing a review of Sonic on Xbox 360 would be like writing a letter to a child explaining that their dog has died, and that the reason the dog died is because it was in the car with mummy when it got stuck under a lorry and caught fire.

It’s better to just laugh at the silly bits that look like inter-species sex and pretend everything’s still all OK:

In the overall scheme of things, Xbox 360 Sonic The Hedgehog ranks beneath Game Gear Sonic Drift 2 and just above Tails’ Skypatrol in the list of all-time best Sonic games.

It’s OK, Sonic, let’s not get into the nitty-gritty of who’s fault it is now. We’ll do that at length over the next three years on various internet forums.

Doesn’t this look like sex is about to happen? Xbox 360 Sonic is out today. There are some reviews of it on the internet, but you’d be best off not reading them if you love or even used to like Sonic a bit. Just watch the bizarre end sequence movies and leave it at that.

This is a pretty one. You can click on it to look at it full size – it’s so pretty we went the extra mile with the html and image resizing. If you just look at this one image for a very long time and don’t think about anything else you might be able to convince yourself everything really is still OK.

By which we mean some words about it and some YouTube videos we were sent, which hopefully won’t get taken down two minutes after we upload them like everything else we link to on the world’s most uptight video sharing community.

The reason it’s jerking about all over the place is because the game’s in a hydraulic cabinet. The cameraman isn’t severely disabled. To our knowledge.

EMERGENCY BACK-UPS
When YouTube, SEGA, AM2, the police and the secret shadowy organisation hell-bent on undermining us by having all our YouTube videos deleted as soon as we link to them has these videos deleted (or if you’re using a computer the council hands out to poor families for free that can’t play YouTube videos), emergency direct-download links to the Afterburner Climax footage are located here:

MOVIE 1

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MOVIE 9

Here’s another Wii advertorial, this time from the pages of woman’s magazine Glamour. And you thought the DS Lite was a bit effeminate…

We, er, accidentally bought this while meaning to buy Nuts or Zoo. Or FHM or Maxim or that one about cars.

Pink pages. Nice touch. That’ll draw them in.

Still, we mustn’t complain. If “the girls” want to stay in and play video games while we go out to drink Stella and snort poppers at strip clubs, that’s just fine by us. Sounds like a great emerging new world order, in fact.

We think this panel might be hinting at the fact you can stick it up your fanny.

Just like any other party, only with a games machine awkwardly tagged onto the bottom. You go, girls.

Keep checking Glamour magazine for more Wii exclusives!

ALSO IN GLAMOUR MAGAZINE THIS MONTH:

50 really obvious arguments for car journeys

A thing about how celebrities are fat so you feel better

Lots of rubbish albums given 5/5

How having shoes is better than being thin

Ha ha! We’ve only been joking for the last ten years! Sony rocks! Let’s all go and buy PlayStation3s and not even sell them on Ebay the next day! Let’s buy 50 just to put in a cupboard! Come on, everybody! The PS3 party queue starts right behind us!

TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
The Utility Belt: Sony’s loss is at least $240 on every PS3, triple Xbox 360’s