Coronation Street, the rubbish soap opera about the tedious lives of poor people who live in the North of England, featured Sonic The Hedgehog in its episode broadcast on Sunday August 27. They were playing it on PC, so it might have been an illegal ROM.

Although, as someone from SEGA told us this was going to happen about five months ago, it looks like a cleverly worked PR trick. Because even though it’s a laughably bad pantomime of a show, Coronation Street is watched by about 12 million people. Stupid people who can’t afford games consoles and think chips count as vegetables, but it’s still quite a coup.

PLEASE NOTE:
We’re not becoming one of those sites that’s just a list of YouTube videos. Promise. It’s a coincidence. We probably won’t do another one of these for six months now. We’re also quite proud of this one as it required (a) finding the episode, (b) downloading the torrent, (c) editing the relevant chunk out of it, and (d) putting the clip on YouTube. This is the first new technical thing we’ve learned since getting a DVD player in 1999.

They’ll be accused of dumbing down again, but we kind of like it.

SmackDown covers always sell.

We know! He will be here! We will be approximately ten metres away from him in the same room, signalling our sexual availability by dangling a red handkerchief from our back pocket.

THE PROPER PRESS RELEASE, SO THIS UPDATE LOOKS A BIT LESS WEIRD AND FRIGHTENING:

5th September 2006. GameCity is beside itself with excitement in announcing the confirmation of game music legend Richard Jacques, who will performing an exclusive live set at GameCity this October. Performing principally on pianoforte, Jacques will be treating the audience to a series of specially arranged renditions, forming a retrospective of some of the most loved SEGA classics.

Following his appearance at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Richard is delighted to be back performing in the UK. He says, “I’m really excited to be appearing at GameCity and highlight the role of music in videogames. It’s a rare event that makes game culture truly accessible to the public, but it’s so important that it’s done. I can’t wait.”

This unique concert event will take place at 2pm on Saturday 28th October, in the majestic setting of St Mary’s Church in the Lace Market, Nottingham – which will be candle-lit for the event. Whilst the precise contents of the set-list must remain undisclosed, we are able to reveal that “Sonic the Hedgehog Medley”, “Shenmue Improvisations” and “Outrun” WILL be being performed.

Phil Lamb, UK Product Manager at SEGA, commented: “Richard Jacques is a talented musician who has produced some fantastic music for SEGA over the years. Richard’s many contributions have complimented the games perfectly and have really enhanced the experience for the players. Having most recently worked with us on some cracking remixes on the soundtrack for OutRun2, Richard has proved to be a real hit with SEGA fans everywhere.”

In 2005, Jacques’ game music was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl for “Video Games Live” to more than 11, 000 fans of video games and orchestral and choral music. Not only was Jacques’ music selected for the world’s largest video game music symphony concert, accompanied by cinematics on the big screen and laser light show, but given his expertise and knowledge of live orchestra Jacques was also invited to arrange and orchestrate the special retro Classic Arcade Medley featuring over 20 games from Pong to Donkey Kong including such classics as Dragon’s Lair, Tetris, Frogger, Gauntlet, Space Invaders and Outrun. In addition, having scored games in the multi-million selling Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, Jacques was selected to arrange and orchestrate the Sonic medley, prompting high praise from Sonic creator Yuji Naka himself.

With the supporting bill yet to be disclosed, Jacques is already providing one of the hottest tickets for GameCity 2006.

NOTE:
“Performing principally on pianoforte” means Richard Jacques will be playing SEGA songs on a piano! We will be performing principally on our penises as Rich soothes us away into a candlelit dream world filled with SEGA music.

A friend of UKR is after a J2ME developer to help with a new mobile project.

If you’re interested, email us and we’ll forward your details in confidence. It’s a serious and proper project that sounds very exciting and will involve being paid, not just doing all your best stuff for free on the internet like an idiot.

Why does everyone with a Google Video game show look disabled? Do they get extra benefits from the government for doing this?

This is what four months of being pawed and abused by cretins like us can do to a woman:

They’re making her do her own hair now the budget’s been spent. We’re officially downgrading her from a Category A ‘immediately marry’ to a Category C ‘would let put it in mouth’.

We’ve made a new kind of t-shirt. This one’s red and says “Spiel Macht Frei” on it, which is German for something and sort of accidentally stuck as our logo because we couldn’t think of anything better in English to change it to.

Then it says “UK:Resistance – Not making a difference since 1996” underneath, which is something new we just thought up, seeing as we’ve been doing this for 10 years now.

We got a whole box of them:

You can buy them from our shop. They come in medium, large and extra fat, are red like we said and quite nice.

This is a photo of them taken with the flash. It gives you a better idea of the colour, which is a nice dark red. Not that horrible bright cheap red. Oh no.

Also, to show how much we love throwing money away, we got ten made in a girls size – for girls.

We made this girl ourselves out of a pineapple, a chair and some socks. She’ll keep us company for the winter, then we can eat her in the spring as long as she hasn’t gone rotten.

This is what the logo looks like in close-up. It’s screen-printed so it will last and looks very nice. We used macro mode to take this photo. It’s always a pleasure to work in macro mode!

We couldn’t use the Sonic logo, as that would make SEGA angry with us and we might stop getting sent free games and stickers. Which, to be honest, is the only reason we carry on with this tedious charade any more.

This is a close-up of the neck. If you’re anything like us you might be a bit ‘fussy’ about what the necks are like on your t-shirts. This has a nice neck. We went to the factory before we placed the order and looked specifically for a t-shirt with a nice neck.

They’re sixteen British pounds, which includes packaging, the new really expensive postage that makes big light things (ie, t-shirts) cost twice as much to send out as before, and us writing out envelopes and taking them to the post office which is amazingly tedious and always makes us wish we’d never bloody bothered doing it at all. Get them here, or don’t, then post about how they suck and you hate them in the Comments field and that that you hate red and that we should’ve done a green one with Tails on instead – THEN you might’ve bought one.

Has it come out yet? Is it exactly like the PS2 version? Or is Polyphony Digital, the least-efficient development team in the world, struggling to make anything look half-decent on the obsolete handheld Lumines machine?

This lie was sent out to fool idiots into buying PSP back in May of 2004. It’s now August of 2006. August 30 in fact, so actually more like September.

Well done, Sony. You made a pretend disc. This actually fooled some people for about a year! Fortunately we now know you just make stuff up and lie about things all the time, so we (the internet and therefore everyone in the world) won’t be falling for it again. This isn’t 1996 any more. You can’t expect to lie to people and for no one to notice. Everything is recorded in Google.

And well done again for making a pretend box. Now you just need to make something interesting to put in it, as with PSP and PlayStation3 in general.

The amazing detail on the pretend box, where Sony cleverly preempted what everyone would say and then said it first. This, thinking about it, was the precise moment Sony started thinking that lying to people would work as its new strategy.

Here’s an email we got about Nintendo giving away sex aids to children. If only all our emails were this imaginative, this much about sex, and this free of typos, instead of from angry retro gamers and weirdos who think we’re serious about wanting to rape Cream’s bottom:

“In case you weren’t aware yet, McDonalds in America has made a deal with Nintendo to make six Nintendo-themed toys for their Happy Meals, asking kids to “Take The Mario Challenge” (whatever the fuck that means). However, it would appear to anyone clever enough to see through Nintendo’s paper-thin disguise that the “toys” are actually sex aids for the kids’ parents and “Take The Mario Challenge” translates directly to “Let Mario And His Friends Help You Jizz All Over Your C&A Jogging Bottoms”.

“Please find enclosed photos of the three most dubious items.”

“A Mario ‘ball’, clearly small enough to be inserted into the anus for
homosexual male stimulation.”

“A Yoshi ‘lickout machine’ (with another free anal ball), which allows you to have everyone’s favourite dinosaur give your lady friend a cheeky gobble, with his upper snout clearly used to agitate the clitoris.

“A Yoshi ‘wank mate’, designed to wrap firmly (yet gently) around the shaft of the penis, allowing you to pretend you’re getting chugged off by a stupid wee green bastard with a squeaky voice.

“I hope you will all join me in “Taking The Mario Challenge” by grabbing a hold of young Yoshi and giving the old boy a jolly sound thrashing.”